Version 0.15, What's New & What's taking so long

Version 0.15 is here, hurray!
And only a little more than a month after the end of the jam too.

This is my first attempt at defining how numbering versions should work, so here's a little breakdown of how I'm going to number things. 
I'm trying to keep the scope of the game in under 100 versions, so that v1.0 should be the released full game.  Anything I feel represent a major update, like a new core feature, or all characters are in the game, etc will be a 0.x, making the initial release of the demo version 0.1.
Anything less meaningful will be within 0.1x and 0.2, 0.2x and 0.3, etc, incrementing the next decimals for bug fixes within  a version.
Hopefully that makes sense, and we'll see how things go from here!

I guess in some sense, this means that we could look at v0.15 and say the game is 15% done.
I'm not sure that's true, but I'll roll with it for now!

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WHAT'S NEW IN V.015
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- The Dialogue System -
The dialogue system has been restructured, and the logic is no longer hosted in the game screen widget. Rather a dialogue widget has been created for each character and each of them hosts the dialogue logic for that character. Unfortunately that's pretty much invisible to players.

 The only things players would notice are the generic dialogue options. In previous versions, if you talked to a character outside of a specific context, triggering the generic dialogue, the dialogue topics would be cycled among themselves, sometimes being available, sometimes not, based on what topic you'd chose last. 
Now, all the dialogue topics are available based on what players have learned and you can scroll up and down to display a new selection of topics choices. Unfortunately, I forgot t add a little UI indication that you could scroll...

- Updated and New Characters -
Characters have all been updated and received a fresh coat of paint.
Previous iterations were static meshes made of merged parts in Unreal, but now they're all freshly remade skeletal meshes in Blender. Some parts have been rethought to support upcoming animations.
And we're also welcoming the following new characters in Olympus:

* Aphrodite
* Ares
* Artemis

None of these characters have any task, vignette or dialogue yet, that will come later, but they at least have their thought UI and temp dialogue UI.

- Animated and Moving Characters -
All characters are now roaming Olympus. Well, not everywhere, but there's a fairly decent amount of movement.
I'm loving this so much, and this little thing brings the game a lot closer to what I originally envisioned!
So that's very exciting, but...

This little feature creates a bunch of issues, as expected.

Right now, there's a little logic contradiction on how they behave. Clicking on any character will have them stop and talk to you, or at least update their thought widget. But there are some times where the characters shouldn't react to you clicking on them and shouldn't stop, based on their state, which is only identified once you've clicked on them. So I need to see how I can update that logic so that NPCs don't always stop on click.

There are also some animations glitches where most of their hands end up crumpled, which means I'll have to go back to see how I can improve my tech animation workflow. Right now I'm using Mixamo to weight the vertex for each character then reassigning that character to the same generic Mixamo skeleton for all of them.

Finally, there's not navmesh everywhere and actors like doors don't handle navmesh yet, so characters cannot enter or leave rooms. Plus, they can go hide in the bushes in the Divine Pools, which is quite funny.

- Misc -
* Some dialogue lines have been rewritten
* New dialogue lines have been added
* There is a new way to die
* Sympathy dialogues can now be triggered
* Being resurrected by Hades no longer requires restarting the game
* Tormented souls now look like glowing ghosts
* General timer has been slightly increased
* Dialogue text is now animated
* Cursor switches back to base cursor when initiating dialogue

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WHAT'S TAKING SO LONG
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Figuring out the tech animation workflow took me a full exhausting week, and I'm not done yet since I have animations glitches I'm not sure yet how to handle. To give you a better idea here's what I mean by tech anim:
* Defining how to create and manage the characters generic skeleton, so that I don't have to use a different skeleton for each character
* Defining how avoid manually assigning vertex weights to the character mesh, and how to break down character based on complexity
* Understanding what Unreal imports give me the results with the least glitches
So basically all the steps that need to be handled and figured out before I can start trying to make or plugging animations for these characters.

So that took a while, but that's not the main reason.
The main reason is because Olympus Central was born out of a game jam, in which I spent three weeks away from my initial main game.
On which I had to go back, eventually.

So the main reason why things take some time, is that I decided to work on both projects at the same time.
One week per game, then switch to the other game, while allowing me some bonus time if I want to finish something before switching of course. Only time will tell how stupid a decision that might be, but so far I do enjoy the change of scenery when switching, even if it does require a little adjustment each time.

There you, go I think that cover things up!

Next, I still need to rework the controls, add that little bit of UI to indicate scrolling through dialogue options, standardize and redo all characters vignettes, and eventually create tasks and dialogue content for the new characters as well as adding these  new tasks topics to the preexisting ones.

Feel free to download the updated version and please let me know about any feedback and suggestions about the game, I always love to hear those. I've also created a discord server that should be online in the very near future and where I'll be posting updates about both games on a daily basis. And if we're lucky we might even see some updates from the third project... 

Exciting times ahead!