As you can see above, we’re preparing everything for the arrival of the Raptor Pack in GENBA no Kizuna! Our four murder suspects will soon be added to the game, which means that we need to add a bunch of new stuff like their profiles, too!
As such, I’ve been focusing on smaller, GUI-related work recently. Not just because of the Raptor Pack, however. I’ve actually made some general adjustments too, like changing the D.O.B.-format of all profile pages and introduction cards for better readability.
One of the more interesting changes, however, is probably the addition of a little exclamation mark icon to the Investigation Menu:
The speech bubble icon is used to talk to characters currently in the vicinity. Most of the little scenes you can view through it are entirely optional. We already had this feature in SHINRAI, but I noticed that many players kinda forget about it (or the time window in which certain scenes are available is way too short for them to be noticeable).
Take Raiko‘s and Nobara‘s arrival at the breaker room, for example. While everything is pitch black, you can actually talk to Nobara.
Unfortunately, I think most players instinctively clicked on the window to immediately open it and let in some light, meaning that the “Nobara in the dark” scenes could not be viewed anymore.
There are similar instances in GENBA, as well. Very short investigation moments in which you just need to click on a single object to advance the story. If you’d pause for a second, however, you could actually talk to the other characters for some extra dialogues and info. These scenes are still going to be optional, but I wanted to draw more attention to them.
That’s how I came up with the idea of adding the little exclamation mark (actually, I stole this idea from Azur Lane *cough*).
If a player actively decides not to view these scenes, that’s fine. But if they don’t view them because I haven’t made clear enough that they’re there in the first place, then… that sucks. I’ve put a lot of effort into writing these, after all!
With this, it should be a little more eye-catching. As long as there are new scenes to view, the icon will appear on the Investigation Menu. If all scenes have been seen, it disappears, thus letting the player know there is no more new content available.
This is the sort of thing I’ve been recently working on. Meanwhile, Natsu‘s been pretty busy as well, and actually completed our monthly artwork for May! Patrons can download hi-res versions over here (there is an alternate background version, too). But of course, the image has also been added to our gallery (at least one of the two versions).
We did a little Danganronpa crossover this time and, as voted by our patrons, our little grumpy detective dressed up as none other than the Ultimate Detective herself, Kyouko Kirigiri (and Monobat‘s here, too!):
That about wraps up our progress summary for the last week of May. Now, another month has begun. The most important month of the year, in fact (well, to me at least w). That’s right, it’s finally Jurassic June! And once again, there’s a lot I want to get done throughout it, so please look forward to our next few updates!
With that, I wish you an enjoyable remainder of your weekend and a great start into the dino month! Until next Saturday, take care! :3
(Also, on a side note… 250 weekly blog posts, yay! /o/)
