Final Iteration!

This is the tenth and final iteration of the game, and also the final development blog post I'll make for this game, time flies!

First of all, our beloved beat 'em up game has a title now, it's called NEW MAN! The premise of the game was heavily inspired by a classic South Korean movie called 'Old Boy', hence the name. Anyways, a new genre has once again made its way to this beat 'em up game, this time it's the visual novel genre! This time around, the visual novel features were implemented alongside the features of the base game/genre.

To start off, I had to decide where to implement the visual novel features. There were 2 visual novel features I planned to implement, dialogue boxes (obviously) and player choice that lead to different outcomes. So with that in mind, I decided to implement these features on the boss character.  Speaking of boss, a boss character has been implemented into the game, her name is Lily!

Back to the visual novel features, now that a place has been decided, time to write the dialogues! I planned and wrote all the dialogues and branches using this website called 'Twinery'. This website is great, it helped me big time in keeping track of the many dialogues and branches. The website also had a feature to run a simulation of all the dialogue options, so cool!

There are 2 outcomes to the many branches of dialogue, one where the player picked the wrong option and has to fight the boss, and the other where the player answers a series of questions correctly and skips the boss reaching a 'good ending'. The answers to these questions were hinted at throughout the levels. For example, one of the questions is "What is my favourite colour?", the answer is "Blue", which is hinted at throughout the entire game with blue paintings on the walls. 

As previously mentioned, the 'good ending' was to skip the entire boss fight, well that was the plan originally, BUT it would be pretty anti-climatic to end the game based on dialogue options in a beat 'em up game. So, I did a 'good ending' screen, but there's a surprise!

So yea, you can't skip the boss. I'll be honest, another reason for the design choice was due to the fact that I spent a lot of time on the boss, so it would be sad for the players to not experience it :'). 

This wraps up my beat 'em up game! This game took a little bit over 3 months to develop while working on another bigger project. As mentioned in one of the previous dev-log, this game was made for an assignment, but I genuinely enjoyed every second of developing this game. There are still a lot of things that I'm aware of that can be improved, if I have time in the future I'll definitely come back and work on this game! Lastly, thank you Mr Johann for your hard work this semester, I had a lot of fun! That is all for the final dev log, thanks for reading!