There's still fine-tuning to go but I've been polishing up the first act's four unique minigames that take place in the futuristic world of Skara-Daphne.

I've tried to smooth out the transition going into them, embedding a tutorial that auto-dismisses itself when you've pressed all the relevant buttons, and also making sure each minigame has a second phase (not balanced yet, but at least it's there).

The second Babelverse scene that takes place in a bar belonging to one of Daphne's old friends has finally been fleshed out:

I hacked in some rudimentary rich text support (don't ask how):

Figure 3: Oof, rough crowd

I added in some menu options and a scene select (about time!):

I addressed how pendant messages are received and how their read statuses are preserved across scene (and game) loads.

Previously, messages would be dynamically pushed in from scenes but this wouldn't be kept in sync if you were jumping between scenes (e.g. via scene select) so you mostly started each scene with an empty inbox and no chat threads.

Now, the correspondence is kept in sync on scene load by keeping all the messages in a central list and deciding whether to load them with:

• a scene string so that messages sent from older scenes can be pre-populated
• a load_before_scene flag for expository between-scene messages to be sandwiched in

I also added a id string for scenes to reference to fetch that message.

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I've made it more immersive for reading story-centric emails or chat messages; previously, I was having pushing the message into the pendant but also redundantly repeating it as dialogue:

But I've now moved to having the UI freeze and guiding the player to check the pendant themselves for the notification via a green, glowing notification:

Figure 7: New: Player guideposted to read the message themselves