It's a bit difficult for me to sit down and write at this moment, but I'll do the best I can. Last week we had some news about the plans we had in Canada that, let's put it this way, weren't good. This, combined with the heat, triggered many migraines for me and complicated everything. We'll see how all of this continues, but for now, I'll need to slow down and take care of some Real Life™ matters.

Still, let's try to review what we've been doing in the last 2 weeks, even if it's shorter than usual.

2dcl

Last week, on the first of August to be exact, we resumed the development of 2dcl. Our goal for the month is to have the Login and Deployment flows up and running.

I had already worked a bit on the backend of this last month, so Pablo picked it up and left an open Pull Request for me to review with the frontend code; we still need to apply a bit of design to the UI, but it's almost ready.

Regarding Deployment, Pablo also resumed what I had left and is currently exploring what's needed to be able to upload all the files of the 2d scenes without having to use the official CLI 🎉.

For now, everything is going very well, and we're a bit ahead of schedule, so good news 😁.

Woods Folk

On Tuesday, July 25th, I began streaming the development of Woods Folk on Twitch and YouTube. I really enjoy the streaming process. I have several ideas in mind regarding this, but honestly, given my current state, it's very hard for me to plan and even harder to execute them, so you'll have to wait a bit. Because of that, I will have to suspend the streams until further notice.

Maps

The first thing I did live was to implement the map functionality in the game. Honestly, I currently don't have the bandwidth to explain everything I did, but luckily it was documented in two videos:

• Map Implementation
• Implementation of tile offset on the map

The downside is that it's in English, we'll see if we can somehow add subtitles or something.

Visual Novel

In the last stream from last Tuesday (I had to cancel Thursday's stream due to chaos and a migraine), I began implementing everything related to the visual novel functionality. However, I decided to do it in a separate project so that there's a public example of how to use 'cuentitos'. This can even be used as a base to create a visual novel.

In the stream, I implemented the loading of the 'cuentitos' database.

I'll upload the visual novel code on GitHub. Possibly in the next stream, I'll rename this to bevy-cuentitos and start first with the basic runtime implementation, and then create another project for the visual novel part. This way, it's easier to use the 'cuentitos' base in other projects that aren't visual novels.

Abril

Before focusing on 2dcl, Pablo managed to make a lot of progress implementing the movement and animations of Abril. He even added collisions.

I haven't had the time or the mental space to review this code yet. I thought about doing it on stream, but since I need the right mindset and don't want to come off as if I'm randomly criticizing someone else's code (because many of the changes I request are personal architectural preferences, not that it's poorly implemented), I decided to do it off-stream. Anyway, when I have the time, I'll review it and try to write something on the blog about how we implemented it.

cuentitos

Although "cuentitos" is essentially ready to be used, we are now going through a period of internal testing, using it for our own projects and seeing if everything is working as it should and if there are any edge cases we didn't anticipate. Both in laida and woods we are writing parts of the narrative using "cuentitos" for this purpose.

As I mentioned in the visual novel section, I will be creating an interface for the "cuentitos" runtime to use with Bevy, the game engine we use.

The idea is that in the not too distant future we implement interfaces for Unity and Unreal, but we can't promise anything. However, this is open source software, so if someone is eager to do this, they can write to me at fran at the domain of hidden people club.

On the other hand, there is still a need to record a video on how to write the scripts. I'm debating internally whether I want to finish the visual novel example before recording this video, or if I should do it with the console command.

Laidaxai

Ara ra epaq vigaxai ¿alota’a? | The black tree is there, do you see it?

These weeks, our artist Juli was on vacation, and I had to reconnect with the pencil again, so these were the developments.

📖 Narrative: In these last weeks, I've been diversifying the lines and options in our story using "cuentitos". The goal is to take the story to a more dynamic point for all of you and make you feel like you're choosing your own destiny in this dream. I still have some spirits to play with ✨.

🎨 Storyboard: In addition, I've been accompanying this writing and editing process with the creation of images. Combining a bit of cinema with comics ⚙️, here's a small part:

🎬 Inspiration: My audiovisual vision for this game closely resembles comic strips and Studio Ghibli movies. We want to combine the classic style of visual novels that break the "fourth wall" with characters looking at the player (though moderately, so we don't overuse this resource). Additionally, we aim to use some static shots to let certain moments build in the player's imagination.

🌟 In the coming days, we will continue to build images that represent the volume of text we have. We'll keep you updated 👩🏻‍💻.

Goals

In the next 4 weeks, we want to work on:

2dcl

• Login with Metamask (2dcl Grant): It's practically finished, I need to do a code review and apply a bit of design to it.
• Deployment (2dcl Grant): We still need to resolve the file upload to Catalyst and see if the signature logic is correct. If that's okay, once we finish with the Login, we'll integrate it with the client starting August 1st.
• Deployment videos: As soon as we finish implementing the simplified deployment, I will record some videos to document the entire scene creation process.

Woods Folk

• Scene Loading: We will finish implementing the scene loading from SVGs. Done!
• Streaming about scene loading: In the end, I implemented the scenes and didn't stream it. 😞
• Implementing the map on stream Done! Here are the recordings of the map and the map scroll.
• Character Movement: Pablo has already implemented this, I need to do a code review and merge.
• Visual Novel Features: We have already started integrating cuentitos with Bevy on the stream. We will continue with this.

cuentitos

• CLI watch mode: Among other things, I want to have a watch mode where the CLI is listening for script changes and asks you if you want to recompile and reload.
• Launch: We are going to launch version 0.2 (At last!). This involves creating a webpage, a blog post, getting the documentation ready, and uploading it to GitHub for download.
• Record explanatory video: I want to record a video or stream about how to write scripts in "cuentitos".

Laidaxai

• Continue with the narrative of Laidaxai: Making adjustments so that the dialogues work based on the game's design. We are limiting some character appearances, and others we are setting as conditions.
• Laidaxai Cinematics: New art for cinematics; we are experimenting with a paper cut style or simulating it, storyboard + concept.
• Continuation of the GDD (Game Design Document) and prototyping: We are continuing the GDD with all the information, and the mechanics are being prototyped in the Table Top Simulator video game.

Community

• Start streaming: We've already started! Tuesdays and Thursdays on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/hiddenpeopleclub/schedule and YouTube. Streams are suspended until further notice!
• Add comments to the blog: a blog without comments is not a blog. So I'll assess the different options we have to implement comments here. I feel like using Mastodon as a comment system, or webmentions, I don't know, we'll see.