Updates to come

Hey all, not sure who's really going to see this but here's a little update on the state of the project. This game has done really well so far, it's gotten more attention than any of my other projects and so far it's been positive. In simple essence I made a game and people like it. This makes me so happy to actually release something that does well for itself, and motivates me to do more. 

With that in mind this is update just to state what's going to be coming for this project, in regards to tweaking bits and pieces. Below is a priority list of how I'm going to work through things.

1) Text box tweaks - This is just to fix spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. There are also a few spaces where I feel the dialogue boxes are too big or small, or other instances where they can be closer together or they are too far apart. Note: My process of creating the text for this game was to make 3D text in blender, take it into unity, and assign materials within unity. This is extremely easy work but very very tedious and boring and I was rushing to meet a deadline when I first uploaded this so I made a few spelling mistakes when retyping out my script into Blender.

2) Creating a scene transistion - This will be an opening page with some simple options like "play, controls, exit, credits", which the game will then cycle back to after the player reaches the end. (Oh and another thing, the game does have a "the end" message but the screen fades to black before most players reach it, which seems to leave most players confused and unsure if the game actually ended or not so that needs fixing too)

3) Boat Control - This game was made to fit a brief that required it be 8-10 minutes long. This unfortunately meant that the boat section was quite restrictive and overly structured around a waypoint system. Reworking the boat controls to give free movement is something I want to do, but I know it will take a lot of time as it means reworking how the docking script works, along with how scattering ashes is coded. What I can easily try to do for the meantime though is to add a simple "stop" function to the boat, so if the player presses the S key then the boat will stop moving forward, which should give any player enough time to read text boxes.

4) Sound Design Reiteration - At the moment there are some simple stock fire crackling and water running ambient noises in my game, but I'm going to be adding footstep sounds for different terrain (i.e grass, wood, rocks, shallow water), paddling sounds, more general "hey you're doing stuff" sort of sounds that provide feedback to the player

5) Smoother Animation - I animated a lot of this game myself, but used preset animation from Mixamo for a lot of this. I'd like to go back through the game and create more custom animation where neccesary, as well as redoing the PC's paddle animation so that the paddles actually stay in his hands rather than being still objects, creating an animation for getting in and out of the boat when docking, etc.

???) Narrative changes - So I'm not entirely happy with the narrative in it's current state as some parts are meant to be kept vague, however other parts are meant to be more clear. From seeing numerous players go through my game, there's unfortunately been a bit of misinterpretation as to the story. This is no fault on the player, but rather a critique on my own storytelling ability. Narrative tweaks are a very weighty process so if they happen, I have no idea when.

So that's about it really. I'm really proud of what I've made here, but there's definitely room for improvement and this game has now become this weird toolbox thing I can use to improve on some of my skills like programming, animation, and sound design, by reiterating over what I've already done. All of the updates listed above won't come down in one massive update that ascends quality across the board, but updates 1-4 should be out within some time this week, however sound design is something that I will probably reiterate on a lot. 

I'm really grateful to everyone that's played it so far, and I hope that my next update will motivate some old players to return and see how it changed, and hopefully interest a few new players to check out Goodbye Brother.

Thanks to everyone who's played so far :)