Hello everyone! Hope you're enjoying the update. The move went over well and I am mostly settled in now, and have been working on the missing pieces that were supposed to be in v0.9.0, so today we'll be going over a few of those!

If you have yet to experience the new content in v0.9.0, there's going to be spoilers in here, so beware!

The missing pieces

Aside from the missing scenes I mentioned in the update release post, there were also a few missing art assets which we'll be going over in here.

The HQ gets expanded

It's the SG meeting room from the Christmas party scene! While I was already at it, it made sense to first make a regular version, and then edit it to create a variant with Christmas decorations as described in the dialogue - this room will likely see some good use in future scenes.

Your eyes may be drawn to the poster in the above image - that's right, it's a town map!

A proper map of Plursdott

One of the main reasons I wanted to include the map in the back of the meeting room was to give a bit more sense of scale to town, since the overworld map only shows a small part of the town.

In the end, I decided to make a proper map for future-proofing, instead of just smidging a vague semblance of one in the background. You can take a look at a better picture down below:

Even this doesn't cover the entire town - hell, it's not even half of the size I allocated! But, well, you can probably tell just this alone took a good amount of time.

I tried to cross-reference actual maps of places I've lived in to capture the scale right: Plursdott is described as a "small town", but it's not a tiny village by any means - too small and it would be too restrictive for storytelling and for the possible amount of strangers and conflict you can run into; too big and... well, it wouldn't be a small town.

More missing art

Here's one for the main addition in v0.9.0: a proper shot for December 25th. The opening lines of the scene ended up being more vivid than I expected, and it needed a proper visual to go alongside it:

And finally, here's a variant of an already existing piece of art, but one that will give you an idea of one of the upcoming scenes without actually showing it:

And now, something completely different

I like to work on silly little miscellaneous projects every now and then to break off the monotony of just working on the same old thing (see the Legally Distinct Word Guessing Game in the phone menu!)

With 0.9.0, I've been getting close to finishing up this lil' thing, so you can expect to see it alongside the next update - here's a teaser:

Ta da, it's a clicker game! One nice thing about having spent so much time on the character model system of CoG and all the sprites is that I can use them for other ideas like this one.

It's a somewhat primitive clicker game, much like ones from the olden days, but there's a bit more to it that the screenshot doesn't show, so I'll leave that for you to discover when the update is up!

Finally, let's talk about the Date Limit

There have always been discussions around the date limit and how restrictive it can be, and now that I'm working on a smaller update, I've decided to finally take a look at what can be done about it.

First, let's clear up the main purpose of the time limit: to avoid breaking future events that are time/date specific - i.e. the Christmas event. Now that the necessary backend logic for date-specific events is in place, you can expect more date-triggered events.

The current date limit is the most straightforward solution I put on back when the game first started, and for the reasons above, some kind of limitation is necessary for things to work. But, there are a few other options:

Keep the time limit the same as now

Allow saving past the date limit, but make such saves un-transferrable to future versions

This one's basically the current solution, but with the added bonus of being able to keep a save going to finish out the content - even if it won't carry over.

Remove the time limit entirely and let player manually view passed events

Since I'll be retroactively adding the 24th Dec event in the next update anyways, I could use the same system for all future content: a button in the Player Room that allows you to manually trigger events from passed dates.

The main reason I haven't gone for the other two options is because of clarity:

Option 2 introduces a lot of extra book-keeping on the side of the player that can make it confusing when a new update comes out.

Option 3 messes with the flow of the storyline - from dialogue not making sense if it is written for specific date, as well as causing a generally confusing jumping back and forth. This one's also the most implementationally demanding due to the backend logic mentioned above.

However, since this keeps coming up, I've decided to leave it to a poll and see which solution everyone would prefer!

And that's it!

No card of the month as all of it was already included in 0.9.0, but if you've made it all the way down here, thank you for reading, and as always, thank you for supporting the project!

(Below is the poll for what to do with the time limit!)