Happy Fall

Hey Everyone,

 Hope you had an amazing summer, welcome to SPOOKY season!

So after the dumpster fire that is updating Unity versions (as mentioned in my last devlog) I made some real headway in getting the game into a newer state that I really really like. Here are some major updates:

Game Manager

You won't see it anywhere in game but I managed to make the game manager much tighter nit and super specific. Instead of using unity's inspector to add game objects to public variables, I just made the Gama Manager a container for global variables and game states. By switching these on and off I can trigger a lot of things and make gameplay smoother - for instance, changing weather or background music. 

The biggest advantage to reworking this came with resetting the game. Can other devs confirm that making a game reset nicely is a real pain, or is it just me? I find it so difficult and tedious to make sure all of the game objects connect, so just having a main manager that scripts find when they are made really helps when reloading the scene or switching scenes.

Gameplay

The puzzles are mostly the same, I just moved them around. I think these puzzles will remain pretty unchanged as I near the end of development - I'll just need to strengthen the link between this and some story elements. I added some new interconnected pieces to make you explore more, so let me know what you think of that!

 For an ending I was able to mostly reconstruct what I had going when you find all of the idols, but I did create a pretty cool lose condition. I made a strike system which is visualized for the player by HUD elements that look like bloody slashes. Very cutesy, very demure. This is a more visceral feedback for getting puzzles wrong and a huge upgrade in my opinion from my old system which was a basically a glorified timer. I might expand on it later.

I haven't done anything with collecting all the notes - but I think I'd like to make an alternate ending with a more hopeful outlook.

Roadmap

Honestly guys I really see it coming to an end soon. I mostly have some aesthetic things I wanna do, really nail the connection of gameplay and story, and of course have a lot more testing done. I appreciate you guys as always for playing my game and sticking with it! Please get in the comments and criticize my work so I can do better! 

Also, I have used Unity's build feature for Mac users. Please if you use a Mac for gaming play and let me know if anything doesn't work!