-- Incoming Transmission --

Um, hello Cosmonauts 

My name is Dyraxi kos Sol (which is Nebulian for "Dyraxi from Sol" in case you were wondering...) and I'm the Lead Developer at Nebulians at Work
Basically I'm the one you yell at when something in the game doesn't work (but I wish you wouldn't...)

The Boss told me  it would be good for my confidence if I started posting updates on here so uh, I hope you don't mind if I indulge in a bit of status update

While the writer is busy polishing the script and the artist is finalizing the concept art for Episode 1 I'm in charge of porting all of our existing systems from the Demo to the Episode 1 project in a fashion that will allow us to re-use them going forward

The demo was put together in a bit of a Game Jam-y way, basically we just put things together as we figured out how they worked and to test ourselves and figure out if we can pull the whole game development thing off (and see if we could retrofit our modern software in a way that can be run with your Terran hardware)

As I move our gameplay systems from the demo to the final game I'm taking the chance to do some improvements, today I would like to talk about one of these improvements

If you have looked at the Dialogue system in the Locked Room and thought to yourself "wow this dialog system looks pretty plain" you're absolutely correct - that's why I decided to go for a bit of a overhaul

If you figured out how to access the prototype from the Demo (just try to use the hole again once you've unlocked the door) you might have noticed we color coded some of the dialogue options to indicate which Nebulian will say the line you click

This is what it looks like in the current Dev build

I hope you can picture little DD and Axy heads next to the dialog choices in lieu of the icons I just borrowed from the engine in your mind's eye

The icons will also allow us to mark other kind of specific options: if a line happens to end a conversation it will have an exit sign next to it, if a conversation is about a specific key item it will appear next to it, if it's about asking four a hint it will have a little question mark and so forth

You may also have noticed there's a downwards pointing arrow on the bottom right - that's because the dialog box now scrolls! You wouldn't know this as you can never say more than 5 things at a time in the demo, but it's limited to just 5 options

The new box still only holds five options as to not eat away too much at the art below (especially on widescreen resolutions, which we support!), but now you can scroll by using the up and down buttons, your keyboard/gamepad, or (my personal favorite) scrolling with your mouse wheel

I will have more to share about how the Sah'ssg is made soon, but for now I must say goodbye - not because I didn't enjoy our time together but because somebody has to water the plants around the office... they get really aggressive when they're thirsty

-- End of Transmission --