Oh, come on now! How is it nearly June already?!

May, like all the other months so far this year, has come and gone in the blink of an eye, leaving us both pretty bewildered at how quickly time is flying by. It feels like only weeks have passed since we were celebrating the new year, yet here we are nearly halfway through the year already. Unbelievable!

We were briefly banned from Twitter this month (the horror!) as we fell victim to the great purge of May 2023, and we’re currently banned from Instagram for a crime we didn’t commit, but despite all of this we’re just about to hit 2,000 Twitter followers. At the turn of the new year we had just 400 followers, so our minds are blown by the level of growth we’ve achieved so far this year. Chelsey’s got a special surprise planned for when we hit 2,000 – as long as we don’t get there before she’s had a chance to finish it, which we’re sorry to say looks less and less likely by the day, we’re gaining followers that quickly! – and we’re excited to see where we’ll be this time next month.

Adding to the ‘excitement’ guess who just turned 30 this month? That’s given me a lot to reflect on, I can tell you – some of it positive! Whilst Chelsey continues to focus on the comic and the graphics for our game, I’ve started the ball rolling on something outside of the realm of Kinoko and friends, but very exciting if it all goes ahead. It’s early days, so I’m trying not to talk about it too much at the moment even if it does occupy a significant chunk of my headspace, and movement in this sort of thing is traditionally very slow – but if all goes to plan we could be facing another upheaval in our personal lives relatively soon.

Between this and the chaos of all the social media suspensions, we’ve still somehow found the time for a bit of work this month. Chelsey completed and released the second page of our Galaxy versus Blackhole comic, which you can read right now. She also completed more of Kinoko’s graphics/animations for the game, and created some proper graphics for the starsprites which look absolutely fantastic in this writer’s humble opinion. We’ve also dedicated a fair bit of time this month to revising our game’s plot somewhat. We won’t go into too much detail about that today, though, because we’re still working on it.

As for myself, I’ve been busy working on our game’s dialogue and progression systems. I’ve put less work into the progression system than I have into the dialogue one, but I’m excited to show that off at another opportunity. The work I’ve done so far means that we can use events that cause things to happen and possibly even move the game’s narrative along. For instance, talking to Chaga now opens up a conversation opportunity with Astraeus, and talking to him launches the tutorial. It’s inspired by one of my favourite games of all time – The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion – so if you know how quests work behind-the-scenes in that game then you might already have an inkling of how exactly I’m doing this.

But what I really wanted to share today is the game’s dialogue system, since I’ve made a particularly good amount of progress on that this month. It’s official, Kinoko can now talk to the game’s many NPCs with the push of a button!

Whilst it does need a redesign – a dull grey box isn’t very interesting to look at – this dialogue facility already has all the functionality you’d expect. You can initiate a conversation by pressing the action button in the vicinity of an NPC, and once in dialogue with them you can skip the typing effect to hurry things along or cancel the conversation entirely. The only thing we don’t have in this dialogue system currently is the ability to have multi-threaded conversations with different options. We’re debating whether or not that’s something we need, but it’s likely that our revised plot – which we’re working on currently, as mentioned earlier – will determine that.

In terms of writing and maintaining dialogue, that couldn’t be easier. At least until we add options within conversations (if and when), dialogue is currently no more complicated than an array of strings, with a few little features thrown in for the writer’s use (well, my use). The hash (‘#’) symbol is currently designated to a momentary pause in the dialogue output, for instance, which allows the writer a certain degree of control over the speed of a conversation. I’ll definitely be adding more stuff like that, and I’m quite keen to add formatting controls too like bold/italic text. Watch this space.

In other news, our new website is coming along really nicely. I wish we had more of an update to share on that, but the new ‘explore the series’ pages (e.g. characters, species, worlds) are a massive job to redesign and redevelop and I just don’t want to spoil anything too early – but we’ll definitely have a nice progress update and some screenshots to share on it soon, probably on Twitter (and perhaps Instagram too, if they decide to unsuspend us).

Anyway, that’s it for this month, but in summary it’s been another busy one! Until next time!