Among the many, many things that have happened on BYTE in the last two weeks, the most prominent and important addition is the open world space. There are now three separate rooms that the player can move around in. These rooms, the bedroom, office, and common area will be the main areas that the player has access to in the 7-day demo of BYTE, so having the rooms created with the ability to move around them and interact with objects in them was the important final step to creating the core structure of the game.

The game now flows like this: the player goes through the intro dialogue sequences (which still have not been cut down yet), then they are given a tour of the three rooms by Dracula, who then leaves Jonathan to let him go to bed. The player can now explore the rooms, and going to bed will advance to the next day.

At the start of the next day, Jonathan is at work and Dracula introduces him to the computer and tells Jonathan that he has forgotten the password to it. Jonathan tells him not to worry and that he should be able to hack into the computer without issue. The end of this conversation then starts the first battle which has not changed at all yet.

The game is still…uh…very rough and not particularly fun, but the core is there now and the next few weeks will all be dedicated to making actual artwork, which should ideally help.

In addition to the open-world things, in the process, I also made a lot of improvements on some of the overall game things like moving between scenes and the input. Last Monday, in particular, featured a pretty intensive six-hour battle with my arch nemesis the Unity Input System. God forbid I have multiple PlayerInput modules that I can switch between in a scene! Anyways, I got it sorted. I think the solution was ugly and unpleasant but it also seems like the correct way of handling the input in instances like this.

The advancing days system I am also very excited about. I hope that once I write the necessary dialogue for the last six days I should be able to add it all pretty quickly.