Final Pre-beta Feature

Big news! I've finished implementing every engine feature that will be in the VN before Beta, and if Beta goes smoothly, before launch.



Today I finished implementing the feature I procrastinated the most, Read Mode vs. Watch Mode. This feature is kind of hard to explain. In concrete terms, it means you can either click through the VN at your own pace, or sit back and let the whole thing play like a TV show. But testing every edge case of this is gonna suuuuuck.

FLIES FLIES FLIES was literally written to be a TV show, and when I started coding the engine, I still thought I might be using it to output videos that I would publish as a webseries. So the only mode was Watch mode, and everything in the scripting language was designed to execute its own timings. When I made the decision to pivot to just making it a Visual Novel, I asked myself whether I could mostly leave its behavior as-is.

I figure VN audiences will be used to having the option to take as long reading the dialogue as they want, even if it is also voice-acted. Maybe some people will even turn the voice volume all the way down and JUST read. That thought makes me sad, because I'm still putting just as much work into having the voiceover and watch mode give a quality experience that could be compared with the animated shows which inspired FLIES. But I think it's valid so I've made voiceover volume configurable.

I strongly considered not adding Read mode, with rationale along the lines of, if Watch mode is MY favorite, why would I spend time and energy providing a 2nd mode that I personally wouldn't recommend? If all the testers who use Read mode end up saying "This just wasn't funny and the joke timings never worked" then maybe I will swing back around to that perspective and remove the Read mode feature. But I think it was a good move to at least implement it so I have both options open to me. I'm also a little scared that if it only had Watch mode, people would be everywhere in the comments saying "This isn't a game OR a visual novel, it's just a video". To imagine a more optimistic reason to add Read mode, I envision whether anyone will connect deeply enough with FLIES to want to write critically about it the way I used to write essays about stuff that inspired me. That person would really want to be able to take a screenshot of a moment in the story without having to nail the timing on the PrintScrn key.