"What happened? The last devlog was almost a whole year ago, and it was just a small miscellaneous update. What a weird thing to go inactive after." - Me, 2021

At least going inactive after a post about inactivity feels less abrupt, right?

Anyways, I'm not dead. Errandboy has undergone a lot of changes, both from just being developed, but also from major design changes. Some ideas - like characters retaining information when reversing time - were just me projecting ideas from games I had played at the time, and were removed. Many of these ideas didn't fit, but I kept adding shit because I didn't really know what I was doing, and the scope-creep ending up forming a mountain of unfinished ideas that I'm still eroding to this day. Not to mention the issues of disgusting, unoptimized code, and just general unprofessionalism have made progress relatively slow.

I've undergone a lot of major changes in my life which I won't get into here, but because of this, as well as a lack of dedication on my part, Errandboy development is crawling. It hasn't stopped yet though, and I have made considerable changes that are worth sharing. Just note that the amount of progress and the rate of progress isn't indicative of how it'd go if I was truly dedicated to this. Also note that a lot of shit is spoiler-ish, and I'd rather not share it until people get to actually experience the game, or at least a demo of sorts. I will release spoiler music tracks though, because without context they're just cool songs :D.

First off, here's the new menu.

Looks cool, right? Still might change it, haven't updated it in a year and a half and the pixel art is pretty meh, and the floating title in general is pretty ugly. Still, not a priority at the moment.

Second, there are some big changes to the player character. You aren't playing as some guy with a fixed origin, as I wanted a better roleplaying aspect to the game, and since I was implementing a proper NPC entity system anyways, I thought it would be fairly simple to add.

And it actually was. Shocking I know. Rarely in game development do things end up being easy, but I'm so thankful this was.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/957867815497515008/Sec...

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/957867816344748082/pas...

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/1024890545740455936/28...

The character creator has three parts:

Page 1

- Primary Stats
- Surrogate Name
- Surrogate appearance
- Surrogate gender

Page 2

- Secondary Stats
- Surrogate Passions (Both Minor and Burning - like Rimworld!)

Page 3
- Perk Selection (You start with 4)

Thirdly, there are now major changes to gameplay.

For starters, dashing is now more of dodge roll than a weird jump forward. It's also way faster than a dodge roll realistically would be, but that makes for more fun gameplay, so...

There's also now a temperature system in game, and you can contract hyper and hypothermia.

A dynamic weather system which takes into account precipitation across the year, as well as temperatures makes this something you'll have to adapt to across a playthrough!

And yes, I did say "across the year," as now there is both unique months, days, and years on the planet you play on!

The 25 hours a day, 5 days a week, 8 months a year unique calendar may take getting used to, but I think it's super dope for worldbuilding, immersion, and roleplaying.

We also have buffs and debuffs that appear on the side of the screen like this!

The entire audio system has been revamped! The built-in one in the engine I'm using kinda sucks ass, so this custom system will enable me to do way cooler stuff. Also, the audio itself has been revamped, sound effects have been tweaked and such. Speaking of audio, the soundtrack has been updated! As always, it's available at https://errandboygame.bandcamp.com/album/errandboy-ost.

Lockpicking has been added to the game!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/1021274708534120529/18...

Looks easy, but trust me, without leveling up your Intrigue Secondary Stat, higher tier locks will become nigh-impossible.

Now, you can do DRUGS! And eat food. And drink. Consumables are now working!

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/1010063934780358666/18...

Gunplay has also been DRASTICALLY CHANGED.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/1069859298722725908/30...

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/1071166115738304653/2_...

A lot of these screenshots/videos are from ages apart. You can tell, the first gun video doesn't even have hitmarker sounds.

Visually, the guns look better, bullets light up in the dark properly, everything is just nicer.

Gameplay wise, the game acts more like an RPG, meaning some bum who has never handled a gun their whole life can't aim perfectly at your crosshair, will never land critical headshots, etc. The Accuracy Secondary Stat is the way to go if you wanna actually aim your guns, bows, throwing stars, whatever.

One of the biggest changes is that now, there is ACTUAL GRAVITY.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/996585024356896878/12_...

(This video is super old, there are no jumping animations or anything, no sfx or vfx, but its shows how the 2.5d works)

In case you didn't know, before this everything on the z-axis was fake and simulated. And it SUCKED. Now that's no longer a problem. It's a pain to simulate 3d space in a purely 2d focused engine, but I'm loving how it turned out.

The thing that I'm going to send this devlog off with is NPCs.

My skills have only grown since starting this project. Portraits have gone from this:

to this

I've added systems to make writing and changing dialogue a much less painful and tedious process. It should make translations possible, as well as make the whole experience as a whole better. The EBDIA files are cleaner, sfx now function within them so fading out and playing music or dialogue sfx is easy, not to mention it all uses the new audio system.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/747987219415040091/946961358711291944/202...

In conclusion, the progress is nowhere near enough for the amount of time I've been away for. But there is at least something. Here's hoping I don't disappear for another two years!