#noctidev

Again, touched up animations for Nocti. Want the intro to have a little extra love since it *is* the first impression of the game.

old animation on the right, it's replacement in the center and a new small animation for before Nocti wakes up on the left.

I...... am redoing the talk sprites LOL

Porting the events has given me time to think about the story of Nocti and helped solidify where i want it to go. Its also made me realize that said story, the real "meat" of the game, is found by poking and prodding and showing effects to NPCs. This fits excellently with Nocti's theme but isn't everyone's cup of tea.

In an attempt to mitigate player frustration (and get people to see the stuff I've spent ages on) I've added features to hopefully make finding interactive objects easier.

The in game manual is there to explain the exploration/YNFG genre game loop and basic controls to new players. Interaction Indicators will either highlight objects when you hover over them or when you walk by, based on if the mouse controls are on or off. The symbol also changes to match the type of interaction.

Highlight Objects puts a white, slowly pulsing border on collectable or important objects like Effects and Orbs. Exit Arrows shows the location of more ambiguous transfer points on maps. These options are all off by default, but if you need a little help getting around or need extra clarification they're there for you.

I've tried my best to make as many accessibility options as possible given RPG Maker's limitations, so I hope someone can put them to good use.

There's also a character that serves as a diagetic Universal Hint System, but they aren't immediately present. There are currently two ways to unlock them early, and I changed the dialogue of the item for the easier method to make it clearer you are doing the right thing.

As a final note, I found out the Nocti has an article on the new YNFG wiki, but it is super out of date, mixing stuff from the Jam entry and the current build. I feel weird editing it myself as the creator, but I don't know how big of a following this game has. I don't advertise much, and it's been a long time since an update... If it comes down to it I'll update it myself but for now I'm sending out a call to action.

I've been kind of keeping up with my self imposed schedule... kind of. Sometimes you get bored of one part and you have to work on other parts instead so you can at least get something done. I've gotten to a point where I'm about halfway through the new content for 0.2, and now I'm taking a break to finish up some areas of the Nexus that weren't accessible in the 0.1 demo. The Nexus keeps getting bigger and bigger... it's becoming it's own world in a way. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing, lol. I've also shuffled around some parts/ entrance points to worlds because I felt the distribution of them was off.

In other less pleasant news...

From my research It seems that RPGMaker games are not able to handle screen readers. I was hoping this wouldn't be the case, but unless I'm missing something there won't be an easy way to have it work. I've wanted to keep this game as accessible as possible despite RPGMaker's limitations, so now my options seem to be either find someone who can code that functionality in or find my own hackney way of doing it with common events and text to speech files. Both of those options call for an amount of labor and money that I don't have at the moment however, so for now the game is just not going to be low vision/blind friendly. Maybe one day...

I'm hoping to finish my current WIP worlds in about a month or two, and then do some polishing and maybe put out a new demo? Then I'll be on to the next two worlds!

Oh! Also! before I forget, I changed how the swim effect was coded, so it will actually work correctly when you use a mouse. Instead of you moving one tile at a time and having to click over and over to get to where you want you'll be able to just click once like when you're on land. It's funny, when I first started this project I purposefully disabled the mouse movement and sprint because I wanted it to be faithful to Yume Nikki, but now I can't imagine the game without them.

Thanks for following the development of Nocti! See you next month!