Hey people that casually check out updated topics in this forum.
Since the year is basically up, I thought I'd share some of the immense progress that I have slowly made over 2015. It seems very odd that this much effort gets put into what is a comedy campaign, but I guess that's because I'm sort of nuts and it just comes naturally to me.
There's so much I did this year, but it still seems like there's a ton to do. …What did I do exactly? You think I'm just saying that because I'm lazy? Well you are right, but seriously, I did a LOT of work… Oh! Why don't I just check out my SVN commit log?
"*Throws all uncommitted material in at the same time*"
Oh right. I'm terrible at that. I guess I'll just have to remember like a sucker.
• Revamped the
Berserk system. Added new ways to gain berserk power, such has damaging enemies or getting kill combos.
• Revamped the
Item Drop system and new items. Now some items can give off extended effects and I can set up objects that continually spawn items or ones that drop specific items.
• Began a giant transition towards moving all fiction viewer/command briefing/briefing parts to
visual novel-style drama scenes. Yes, no more briefings or squinting to read a few lines of text at a time now.
• Added a
cool and wicked health bar and made all player subsystems invincible, so no getting your comms shot out and missing all my hi-larious jo-okes. (Also I love to destroy what makes FreeSpace, FreeSpace)
• Finished the
draft phase of the main missions, and got half of those at the 99% completed mark
• Halfway completed
some fun side missions that don't really belong in the main plot. If I did, they'd be filler, and we don't need that… or do I…
• Added lots of
pretty pink starships (Note I totally stole those from another game. Not the pink part though, I added that)
• Outlined
JAD2.23 so I actually have an end in sight now!
• Learned how to spell
frustrated (Apparently there is an 'r' after that first 'f')
• Attempted to
kill bmpman in the most savage way
I think that last part has been the part I've been most excited about.
Spoon has feverishly been hard at work completely redoing all the original art for JAD. He's also been having fun interpreting my inconsistent and conflicting descriptions of the characters. The main issue is that these way cool fully redone and animated graphics take a LOT of frames. Holley's head anis alone take up over 1000 frames! To keep things somewhat organized, I had to make a temporary folder just to house them.
But recently, those headanis got a lot more manageable recently with apng builds being out for testing. Spoon's first apng commit replaced 3881(!!) png frames with 33 apngs. But I really think the effort has been worth it. Please check out this partial playthrough of a JAD2.21 mission with the new headanis (also not all the head anis are done yet (like Epsilon 1 and Merv), but I thought that mission had some great expressions from Holley at the start)
And there's still a lot to go, especially with the larger art for the visual novel sections. (Please give Spoon your encouragement and support)
As alluded to before, the visual novel parts of JAD will get a big upgrade. Before they were just giant floating heads, but now they are living breathing adorable-eyed 2d people. To give you an idea how little you'll actually be flying spaceships and shooting down enemy spaceships, here's a small episode of "Meet Holley's Friends" that will be added to JAD somewhere as an extra.
Now it is with a heavy heart that I announce some features that have been cut for JAD2.22 because of time and budgetary constraints. I know you were looking forward to some of these features, but maybe they'll get implemented in DLC.
The following has been taken out:
• Cat petting simulator (Dog petting will remain)
• Persistent Cake Economy (replaced with a local cake economy)
• Fishtanks
• That thing where you can do a quarter turn on the joystick and you get like this ding ding which is your prompt to double tap the A key to activate the Solar Plexar Returner, but only during a very specific cutscene.
• Treasure Hunting for Molerats
• Crafting System
• Three hats, but there will still be a positive quantity of hats
• Side quest where Delta 1 is an out-going call service rep
• 9 mission beach arc
• 14 mission mountain arc
• 87 mission tournament arc
• 2 mission elevator arc
• Automatic online matchmaking. Matchmaking will now always be biased against you.
• Emo Kids (pushed to JAD2.23)
• Trojan software to acquire player credit card information (my analyst said most of you are unemployed anyway so I shouldn't waste my time)
• Bananas
• Decreasing a weapon's power usage by 0.1
And btw I changed the name of the episode. Now it's
Just Another Day 2.22: You Can (Not) Be Serious.Maybe I'll release something next year...!