Dev. Blog #3

The month turned out to be quite challenging, but development continues regardless! Today I want to tell you about the game development process, what stages it goes through before release, and some of the issues I've encountered along the way.

### How does the development happen?

First, I form the main idea by asking myself questions:

What should be in the new update?
How can this happen?
Who is capable of doing this?

After coming up with the main plot, I move on to MindMup 2 where I start briefly outlining the storylines. I determine which choices will be available, how they affect the characters' relationships with the protagonist, when a character might die, and where there’s a chance to continue playing in future updates.

This is roughly what the player choice tree looks like at the moment. It helps me navigate the plot better. I can see what happened previously to the hero, how often players could make good or bad decisions, and in which scene they might transition to another storyline.

Once I’ve outlined the story as branches of the tree, I proceed to writing dialogues. Each scene is written separately in Microsoft Word and then inserted into the game.

Based on the scripted situation, I understand which images need to be shown, so I sit down to draw them using Clip Studio Paint.

Finally, I work on the code. I set where backgrounds change, where music plays, where variables are modified, and where these variables are checked.

When the update is almost ready for release, I focus on adding new drawings to the gallery, testing, and translating the entire game into other languages. This is the minimum amount of work I do before releasing a new update. Perhaps in future developer diaries, I'll describe different stages of development in more detail.

### The error "I'm sorry, but an uncaught exception occurred."

Those who played in English may have noticed that there were very few apostrophes ('). This was because while coding the game, I found it easier to mark text displayed on screen with single quotes ' ' instead of double quotes " ". Sometimes I missed places where an apostrophe needed to be placed. As a result, when I wrote something like gaby's, the game interpreted everything after gaby as part of a variable name, which caused an error when the player reached that dialogue. I fixed this issue by marking most of the text with double quotes now, so this error shouldn't occur anymore. However, if you find any similar errors, feel free to report them in the comments or on Discord.

With this, I’d like to conclude this dev. blog. I hope you found it interesting. While I can't say exactly when, I plan to release a new update soon. Have a great day, and I'll keep working on new content for you!