Salutations gamers,

0.26 of Dimension 69 is only a few days away! Oh boy! After working my butt off to get 0.25 to you I wanted 0.26 to be more chill and small scale. But I couldn't help myself. 

Remade scenes

As you're probably aware I've been working to remake a lot of the older scenes in the game, as of Monroe getting her scenes remade in 0.24.1, there's only been two characters left to get remakes, Melon and Nate. Nate's scenes still look kind of alright because of how late of an addition to the story he was (rip Niomi), so Melon has been the character I've tried to focus on for this update. Unfortunately for me Melon's earlier scenes are filled with animations, so it's taken a while to do, but I think they are massive improvements. Some of these remade renders are now the best looking renders in the game so hopefully all the Melon fans out there are excited for that.

But I obviously couldn't stop there, because there was something more pressing that needed remaking that I had been neglecting. Well, two things actually, first the Sidequest Renders. Mainly Pearl's little sidequest to unlock fishing, this Sidequest was so old that Pearl had a whole different outfit on, so I quickly remade those two renders of her sitting at the counter of her shop in the dark. Steph's sidequest also needed to be remade and now that looks wayyyy better.

But the second thing that needed to be remade was all the character screens you see when you talk to main love interests. Some of these were years old and hardly fit the artstyle of Dimension 69 anymore, so I went ahead and remade ALL of them (except for Valentina and Osker's obviously) These remakes range from slight changes to lighting to entirely new poses/vibes (you can see a few of them attached to this post)

So all of that's to say i'm almost finally done with remaking old scenes, all that's left is Nate which I'm sure a lot of you are looking forward to.

Fishing Improvements (at least part of it)

A while back I privately outlined what I want the final game to feel like to, what systems I wanted to be in the game, how much content I wanted there to be and this involved a lot of improvements on current systems/new systems to make the 'game' part of this visual novel more fun and interactive (but not too grindy). 

The easiest of these to implement was an expansion to the fishing content, in 0.26 there will be a visual upgrade to how fishing is done as well as a change to how fishing makes you money, now instead of fish automatically being turned into fishing points, you can now hold fish in your inventory (woohoo) and sell them to pearl to get fishing points. This was all an excuse to draw individual sprites for every 'fish'  like for example, the small shark:

Isn't he so cute! He kind of looks familar though, I cant quite put my finger on it. These new sprites will pop up at the end of the fishing minigame to show off what you caught, then they will go straight to your inventory. Remember you can access your inventory by hitting the gear button and going to 'profile' (I might change this to say inventory actuallly).

But this isn't all we want to do with fishing, outside of these visual and audio upgrades I want to introduce other fishing LOCATIONS in other dimensions. I couldn't do this in time for 0.26, but all the visuals are ready for a Eldrite fishing location where you catch eldritch-themed creatures to give to a 'new' shopkeeper. Here's a sneak peek of one of those 'fish'

Oh also here's a sneak peek at what the new fishing UI looks like! 

It's supposed to look like a fishing rod, with a depth meter on the right to show how close you are to catching the fish and a bar on the left that you use to position the rod to catch the fish. Gameplay wise it's very similar, but now you click that big reel in the middle to pull the fish in. Also now there's a lose condition to fishing, there's a time limit on how long you have to catch fish now so hopefully that adds a little challenge to the minigame.

Fast Travel

Man, this devlog is getting quite long isn't it? I haven't even talked about any of the character events yet. Anyway here's another new feature. I realise it was pretty annoying to have to go to the protag's bedroom every time you wanted to travel to other dimensions, so now it's part of the UI!

Here's what it looks like, where ever you are, as long as it's not in an event or another location that blocks time progression, you'll be able to travel to any dimension you want at the click of a button, hopefully the icons are self explanatory... 

I just hope I didn't fuck this up and break everything, causing all other dimensions to be inaccessible for some reason. If anyone has problems with this feature let me know. Also this means that the 'travel dimensions' button the bedroom is no longer there. And hopefully this isn't too close to the end of the screen to get cut off on peoeple's weird phone resolutions.

And well... what else? There's going to be 5 (or 4 depending on time) character events too, some pretty long ones at that. Some fan favourites characters, some of the new cast introduced in 0.25. I'm not going to bother listing out everything in 0.26 like I usually do in devlogs because I've kind of already gone over it. You'll just have to wait for the update in a few days to get proper patch notes.

I hope you are all looking forward to it!