A covid pause

Well, after diligently masking and sanitising in all the right places (oo-er!) for two-and-a-half years, I finally went and caught covid :( 

Looks like I got it from my wife, who got it from a packed two-carriage train journey, where she was the only person wearing a mask, to and from her mandated minimum three days a week at work.

Yay for simple and effective mitigation measures!  /sarcasm

Still, we're both fine, although I'm taking a bit longer to recover than she did. Which all means I haven't been able to do much work on the game for a while. Having said that, this is what I've done in the last few weeks:

• Added a variable to the dialogue system to randomly choose certain computer passwords and a linked hint you find on a tablet
• A bit of layout tweaking so the levels line up and link together properly
• Finished the first area logic, tablet text elements, and cutscenes
• Fixed a bug where the 'walking dust' particles played all the time
• Set up the third scene to load correctly, so you can now walk from the start to the third area and it loads the player character and camera setup

So you can now 'play' the first area, talk to all the NPCs, read all the info tablets, then speak to the brother at the exit and you both walk to the next room together.

With all the basics made, it should now be a case of writing and setting up the tablet infos, creating the cutscenes logics, and doing a first art pass on each location. Not simple, but a bit more straightforward than all the setup work I've been doing thus far.

Still hoping to have a first playable of the initial three areas by the end of this year, just gotta not catch covid again!

Tony.