I haven’t been able to replicate that… But I know where it could come from. I will post a fix in a few minutes, if you could tell me if it’s still happening after that it’d be great.
There will also be a few improvements on pathfinding, it’s still not perfect but the characters should get stuck a lot less in the shop counter.
Sorry about the delay, but the bug is fixed! Thanks!
Also as a separate minor note to keep in mind while updating all the sprites, I feel like the main sprite’s arms don’t tend to scale very well with the main weight sprites early on. I like the look of my characters at the weight stages of 2 and 3 the best overall (I’m mostly here for the stuffing content) but the arms look a bit thin. It doesn’t ruin how my girls look by any means, but if the sprite in place right now isn’t final it might be nice to revise them.
As always, I’m loving the game so far and I’m looking forward to seeing how the game progresses!
Noted, I’ll see if I can improve them a bit while I’m at it. Thanks for your feedback!
Anything to help this already-wonderful game reach it’s full potential!
I’ll look into this. Do you remember exactly what option you were trying to change?
Actually, with the game being pretty much exclusively playable with mouse controls… Is there really a point in keeping keyboard controls in the menu, aside from naming the characters? I haven’t touched the code for keyboard control for months now, so chances are this error was present from the very beginning. For it to be only noticed now shows that it isn’t very much used…
Hey, great game hope to see this to the end, the thing is I’ve been giving emma chocolate and donuts as gifts every single day for a week but i havent seen any increase in her weight. Am I doing something wrong?
NPCs follow the same (ish) rules as playable characters: they need to hit a calories threshold (that depends on the character’s current stats) before starting to gain weight. That said, unlike your characters, some of these caloric needs are automatically filled, so NPCs need a bit less calories before they start gaining weight. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same, so if you want a NPC to gain weight, give them high-calories stuff.
This will be a slow process, and at some point you will probably hit a wall because the calories threshold will be too high. In the future there will be some more ways to fatten NPCs up, in addition to the daily gifts.
Also, while I’m at it, here’s the dialog tree diagrams I mentioned earlier this week.
Emma dialog trees.zip (71.7 KB)
i had this issue too until I deleted my old save data, the game carries over saves from older versions and that bugs it out.
That’s weird… Older saves shouldn’t be an issue, the save system is designed to work with save files coming from older versions.
The way the save system works is I have a list of objects and parameters to save, which are written in the save files. When the game loads a save file, it checks this list, destroys all the objects figuring in that list and re-instantiate them to make sure there are no “leftovers” from a previously loaded save, and then try to apply the values of the saved parameters in the save file to the instantiated objects. If the value is found in the save file, it is applied to the corresponding object. If the value cannot be found in the save file, then a default value is applied instead. This way, if the list of saved items vary from one version to another, the save file can still be loaded.
In version 0.4.0, I added a new object to manage the NPC’s stats, including relation levels. This object was new, so it was absent from all save files and has been instantiated with default values the first time you loaded your save; your save file has been “updated” to the latest version.
I have added a relation tracker in the debug menu, so you can see Emma’s current relation level. It should increase by 8.5 every day after the first interaction until it reaches 25.5. The daily increase should then drop quite a lot. Keep an eye on this, and if something fishy is happening, please include as much details as possible.
Do you have an artist on deck to assist? I am pretty novice and have ridiculous amounts of free time to spare, so I could work on a few sprites you may need and see if I can’t make something happen.
I’m still pretty much a single-person team at the moment. If you want to give me a hand, I’ll gladly take your offer.
I’m supposed to be working right now, but I’ll send you a private message later today to see if you can help 
Sounds good to me, I’ll await the message eagerly and see what I can do.
Thank you!
Regarding the save file, there should be a variable in there called “|npcRelation”. That’s where the relation level for every NPCs are stored. It is not stored as a decimal, Game Maker is saving the list as a dump. So not exactly encoded, but yeah it won’t be easy to modify.
For the time being, I’m not encoding the save file in any way. At this stage of development, it would get in the way of debugging and testing. But once the game is finished, the file will be encoded.
I encountered a small, weird bug today. The price total for what I’m trying to by matches up exactly with the money I have left, but even though the cost number is green it won’t let me buy. It’s an incredibly minor thing that I doubt many people would ever encounter, but I still thought it might be helpful to point out. Keep up the good work!
Apologies for the late answer, I’m a bit sick and have been away from pretty much everything for a little while.
I’ll look into this, it’s probably just a rounding error. It shouldn’t be too hard to fix.
No rush! I hope you feel better soon!
Interesting bug I came across. When one of my characters reached relation 100.25 with Emma, she could no longer talk to her. I could still right click on her and buy stuff, but I can’t talk to her.
On an unrelated note, this is my first time writing a comment on this site, so let me know if I’m not doing it right.
That’s definitely not an intended behavior… I’ll look into this as soon as possible, thanks for the report.
Alright, I think it’s high time for a small work report.
First, it’s going to be a bit personal and I won’t go into the details, but I’ve had some health issue recently. I’m recovering slowly, but this has slowed down my work quite a lot and I haven’t made as much progress as I would have liked.
That being said, I have made some progress. The main goal was to finish as much as possible of the placeholder sprites, and even though I’m not completely done yet, I have finished most of them. A couple ones were a bit rushed due to aforementioned issues and I want to rework them a bit though, but it’ll definitely be done before the end of the year.
I also started working on the clothes, with the precious help of LordOfDeez. It’s nowhere near ready yet, as I have to finish the character’s sprites before I can even think of starting to work on the clothes sprites, but I have the foundations laid out. I also designed the inventory for the clothes and the UI, so basically all that’s missing are those sprites.
Finally, I started working on the first minigame to earn extra money. In this game, you’ll help Emma organize the shop’s storage by playing Tetris! It was a fair bit harder to code than I expected, but I eventually figured pretty much everything out thanks to a lot of documentation an a few example projects. The minigame itself is finished and playable with the keyboard or the mouse, all that’s left to do is beautify the screen a bit so that it’s not just Tetris blocks falling on a pitch black background. Here is a quick mock-up I made:
And that’s about it for what’s to be expected in the next version. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to release it as there’s still a lot of work, but I’m making progress. Once I’m done with this update, I will work on a new NPC, new locations, and new special events/interactions with the NPCs.
