I missed out on last week's update, so there's a lot to go over! Firstly, I was definitely able to fix the jumping issues in office hours, and now I'm really satisfied with the overall feel of Yverne's jump. I've decided to no longer prioritize fixing her animation over some other elements of the game. I added a lot of system dialogue and have it set up so if a player goes somewhere or interacts with certain items, a dialogue box will automatically open with information and must be closed with the R key before the player can continue do work! The player can pick up books throughout the game which will tell them a bit of story about the world around The Thicket. I still need to finish writing the ACTUAL story that will go into my game, but for now, I have some unfinished snippets to give players the idea for my playtest. My first play-test is this Friday so I want to have all my mechanics down, even if all the info isn't ready.

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Another thing I added is a maze in the room on the upper level! I wanted to make it so when players were in the maze, their goal was not only to exit, but also collect ALL the books hidden in different nooks of the maze. That way, they can find out all the important story parts! Since I figured out how to get players to open dialogue box from picking up items, I wanted to apply the same mechanic to looking at paintings, but haven't finished making the 3D mesh for paintings yet. I really want to hang paintings all over the castle that players can walk up to for little snippets of description like "A painting of a happy family... looks like a childhood picture of Yverne", to give more elements of mystery behind the backstory! These are ALL things I'll throw in after the playtests since I don't have enough time to add the rest of the story in 2 days....

My only goal for tomorrow is fixing my broken respawning mechanic! Since my playtests are over the course of a few days, I might actually fix things between tests to see how it goes... I'll write my questions tomorrow.