Jesse Lozano

How has the Month been for Stillness –

March was good, I think? GDC happened in the middle of it, which of course meant no work, and my entire sense of time and space were shot, so there’s that. I got to show off Stillness to some people, so that was cool!

really though, between GDC prep, post GDC exhaustion, and school work getting ready to graduate in May, my time for Stillness was sadly low. The UI/UX improvements is really where I put my time, so hopefully it shows.

What I said I would do (and did it get done) –

• Playtest (yes, actually)
• Polish Level 1 (eh, not really)
• UI polishing (Yes)
• Stretch (Lol, nope, to all)
  • Finish level 2
  • Start level 3
  • Mock up more conversations scenes
  • Paper prototype the emotional control mini-games.

What got done-

So, what I ending up mainly focusing on was fixing up UI, primarily, the thought screen, which now looks like this:

I also did some refactoring of the node system tool I use for this and my other projects, giving it some added baseline functionality, like changing colors, and duplication support. so that’s now there.

while, on the visible side, the thought menu had the most notable changes, I did a lot of behind the scenes spring cleaning of a lot of the deep end internal systems, like dreams, beats, and thoughts are managed, just so it’d be more usable to work with in the future. a lot of prior redundancies, and cobweb code (which is like spaghetti code, but instead of basic elongated lines, it was archaic and compressed weirdly).

Oh, and I technically got some playtesting in, in that I showed off the intro to people (because I wanted to show off the improvements I had made), and got feedback for how the intro flows, so that’s good!.

Time Spent –

• thought menu refactor- 3 hours
• node system refactor – 4 hours
• Dream system refactor – 2 hours
• thought system refactor – 2 hours
• progression system refactor – 1 hour

What to do next-

I really do want to go over and just make the UI as fun to interact with as possible.

Following that, The Apartment itself is going to need some serious touching up. more clickable things, as well as reworking the puzzles, as the puzzles in the apartment should be more dead obvious, as it is the first level, and right now, they not hard, but their not obvious either.

I am, overall, in a refactor and improve the game’s UI/UX sort of mood, so thats going to be where focus goes next. that means, yes, playtesting, as well as just combing level 1 for bugs and soft locks.

so, in list form:

• UI/UX fixing
• Playtest
• Polish Level 1
• Stretch:
  • Finish level 2
  • Start level 3
  • Mock up more conversations scenes
  • Paper prototype the emotional control mini-games.

Closing Notes-

GDC was really cool, and I met a bunch of interesting people! :3