Hiya!

It's been a hot second since the reveal trailer came out, so I thought I'd just give an update on how progress on the game's going!

The gameplay is near feature complete

Cross-Examinations, Psyche-Locks, and investigations are all programmed in and fully functioning! That means that if you're crazy enough, you can re-create the entire Phoenix Trilogy (minus RftA). I've also added in the ability to view the dialogue history, as well as an autoplay feature. All that's left to do is to add in Apollo's perceive function, and all gameplay features will be done!

What's being worked on right now?

1) Converting editor to in-game

Right now, the entire editor is just a series of scriptable objects in the Unity game engine. It works, but gets laggy with longer sequences, requires people to install the Unity engine, and generally isn't very user friendly. So I've started taking all of the various options and making them editable while the game's running.

I'm working on porting over everything you can do in a single segment at the moment, which is more tedious than I thought it would be. At my last count, there were over 50 different parameters you could change per line, so I'm trying out different ways to layout the options so the player isn't overwhelmed.

I'm also experimenting with implementing a "simple mode." This would provide the player with only the bare essentials to make a case, without needing to get into the weeds with everything. I'll need to test how players react to having two different options upon case creation, so I'm not sure if it's gonna make it in.

Though things are progressing smoothly, the final visual style for the editor hasn't been implemented. I'd rather wait until things are in a more visually polished state to show off the editor. Hopefully I'll have more to show in this regard for the next progress update!

2) Optimizing save data size

Slightly less exciting is optimizing save data size. For a while, the ability to save and load a sequence created from the editor has been in the game. This whole time, I've been using Unity's default serialization to save everything. While it has been working, it isn't very efficient. Because of all the options per line that I mentioned above, Unity's process creates a lot of bloat during serialization. It's at the point where a single like of dialogue takes up 5KB. This might not sound like a lot, and it's not. But it's a lot more than it needs to be, so I'm working on a custom save format that should be a lot smaller in size.

One last thing

I'll be sure make videos showcasing the various gameplay features some time in the next couple of weeks. Before I end it for this update, though, I thought I'd show off the different UI styles you can select for your case!

Okay, that's all from me for now.
Good luck!