Others No Trace Of Luck [Pre-Release] [Development Thread] [Godot]

[trazzdiiiii]

Hi all, I am working on a new game. It's built in Godot. Full disclosure up front: All art is AI generated. But I put a ton of work into generating and selecting great art. I generate hundreds (maybe thousands at this point) of images, comb through each one, select the best 1-2 images per batch, and do modifications in photoshop to clean them up before adding them to the game.

I will use this thread to post some updates for the 2 people out there who might care while I work on it. This content is F95 exclusive, I have no patreon, am not accepting any kind of donations, and am posting my content exclusively here for free.

LATEST UPDATE: 5/8/2024

Spoiler: Latest Status Update

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Spoiler: What I'm Working On Next

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Spoiler: Known Bugs

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Spoiler: Longer Term Goals

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Controls: spacebar to skip dialogue quickly, H to hide dialogue

Download if you wanna play:
Latest Download 5/8/2024:

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Screenshots

 

[trazzdiiiii]

New version just uploaded. I have the poker running really solid now. Add character art to the conversations, and built support for short video animations (AI generated). You'll see one at the very end.

New version download link:

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Image:

 

[trazzdiiiii]

New version uploaded. From a content standpoint, only minor changes. But in the back-end there have been some serious overhauls that will allow me to move much faster.

Changes

• Added support for fade-in/fade-out transitions, selective pausing / disabling of the UI to make certain scene transitions (especially video transitions) look a lot better.
• I removed that 1 character cg that I mentioned felt out of place
• I fixed the issue where mashing Spacebar could cause you to inadvertently make wrong choices
• (Not user facing) I modified the open-source scene management tool that I use to better suit my workflow, allowing me to configure backgrounds, character art, and dialogue all in one screen. This will allow me to build new content much faster.

Here's 2 screenshots, one is just for fun (it was already in the game before) the other is a screenshot of my updated scene tools (notice I can now select a Background and Character State on each dialogue node. I could not do this before

Latest download:

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[trazzdiiiii]

New Phone Who Dis??

I spent most of my time making the phone messaging screen really solid. I'm very happy with it now. See gif below (note it appears laggy in the gif, but in the actual game it is buttery smooth)

Note the rest of the phone still extremely early stage and WIP:

• The only conversation that works is Lisa. The 'Poker Girls' conversation will crash the game
• The screen where you select the conversation is very early stage and ugly
• The other app on the phone homescreen is non-functional right now (it will be a change wallpaper app)

The phone will play a big part in this game, so I'm happy to get it working so smoothly here.

Coming up next:

• Clean up the rest of the phone. The wallpaper changer app will likely come later, not in the next update.
• There is a distinct lack of sounds effects right now, I'll work on getting those added too
• Trying to get some animations in various places to make the game feel more alive. (Mainly character art transitions & phone transitions)

Download if you wanna play:

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[trazzdiiiii]

Big update today, spent my whole weekend on it:

Changes

• Made many visual changes to the phone, much less ugly now
• Made Wallpaper app functional + wrote all underlying functionality to enable wallpaper unlocks at arbitrary locations throughout the game. Currently there is only 1 unlock, at the end of the intro
• Added unlock notifications + framework to make any arbitrary notification
• Fixed: Bug where dialogue box would lose focus occasionally, it is now much easier to spacebar mash through the dialogue
• Fixed: Bug where dialogue box continue button would sometimes never appear
• Fixed: The fullscreen experience is now better. This game intentionally uses an abnormal aspect ratio (7:9) and so it will never fullscreen well, but you now get a better experience in fullscreen than before

Coming up next

• It is important than I keep a handle on the memory usage of this game. As much as I would love to load every single image in the entire game up front, that will cause lag as the game gets larger. Today it is not a problem because the game is small. But as I add more and more content and images, it is important that the unused images are unloaded from RAM. My next focus is ensuring I have all this squared away so updates can continue quickly in the future
• 2nd phone conversation proof of concept
• Audio pass - There is almost no sound effects or music in the game. I'll work on creating some and getting them added

Download:

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Image 1: New notification system

Image 2: New wallpaper app

 

[trazzdiiiii]

Holy fuck that sucked.

Latest changes:

• I completely restructured the game files. And holy fuck did it suck. I am never doing that again. I don't care how unorganized it gets, this is the permanent structure of my game files. I'm still not sure everything is working after that. My latest build worked, and I did not dare try and dig any deeper. Never again. It took me OVER 9 HOURS.

• Overhaul of the game optimization to prepare it for the future (when I have hundreds of CGs, etc...). Previously the game peaked at over 160 nodes, and now it sits around 40. I also put structures in place to limit the loading of CGs based on the scene. Rather than loading every CG in the entire game, it will load only what is necessary for the current scene. This does still cause a little bit of lag when the scene is loading, I might be able to fix that later, but for now I'll just say deal with it, because this isn't very easy to fix.

• After completing a phone conversation, you can now go back to the home screen and complete other conversations. Currently there is only 1 functional conversation, so this is pointless, but it sets up the game to proceed from where it left off.

I did not add any new content or CGs in this update, and there isn't really anything interesting to screenshot, so I'll post a preview of an upcoming CG that is not in the game yet:

Latest Download:

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[trazzdiiiii]

One download!! Nice!!

I saw someone actually downloaded one of the previous versions, that's my first download. I understand nobody is downloading because the game is pre-release and has almost no content, but I'm still happy about.

Here is my update for today:

My current priority: I consider the story up to this point to be the "Introduction." My goal is to polish all the game systems as much as possible and make the intro feel really good to play. As well as build systems that will help with the rest of the game too.

So for now, I am only adding very limited content. However, there is some slight amount of new content in this update.

Changes

• The choice selection screen was modified and looks a little bit better
• You can now click an image (in either Wallpaper or Messages) to view it in full screen
• I added another unlockable wallpaper (over 200 images generated to get it right) and updated the intro phone message story a little bit
• Added unlocks into the phone conversations (Depending on which route you take, you unlock a different one) and added a bit more polish to make the intro phone convo seem a little bit more realistic.

Here is my current list for what I need before I consider this initial stage complete:

1. Add 2nd phone conversation
2. Restructure some of the intro story to make the 2nd phone conversation make sense
3. Audio (I say this every time)
   1. Background music
   2. Sounds when tapping around the phone
   3. Sounds when unlocking something
4. Some animations for the character art in the intro. I tried to do this before and failed badly. But I am much more familiar with the engine now, and want to give it another try.

I am really happy with how the game is coming together. It is starting to feel very fluid and very solid. I have spent probably a total of 100+ hours creating this at this point.

Download link:

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Gif 1: You can select an image in the phone conversation to fulllscreen view it (+ sneak peak at the new CG)

Gif 2: You can select an image in the Wallpapers app to fullscreen view it

 

[dreamerquest]

Hey there from a fellow developer.
I really like your method of sharing the development here (which I'll totally steal). :-D

I downloaded your game to see how it's developed.
Note: I'm not the kind that read, so it's a little bias.
- The text reveal is a little slow.
- Some consistency issue with the background images (western house vs japanese house+streets).
- Pretty solid, doesn't crash or bug out.

Given how hard it is to make consistent character with AI, I think you have done quite well.