Working on sanity mechanics

Hello. Since Build C has now been released, I have focused all my efforts on making Build D a reality. I'll recap what I've gotten done since my last progress post to catch you guys up with what's been going on.

Earlier progress

Some time ago, I finished writing Charlie's week 5 sessions and events, which I'm quite pleased with. I've decided to move on to Tom's route, which started with me reading what I had written earlier (which was four sessions out of seven) to remind myself of what was going on. And... I wrote the first ending for Tom's route, one of the bad ones. Then I decided to go on a tangent and rework the ending menu with new icons, which I did, also added an ending description for the Tom ending I wrote. And that would pretty much sum up my progress on Build D until the release of C, which was last Sunday.

Recent progress: sanity

Ah yes, the long-awaited sanity mechanic is finally actually in the game. Well, mostly. I began work on it yesterday by implementing several new instances of losing and gaining sanity, and by that I mean several. If I were to gauge how many new things trigger your sanity to change, I would say... 20? 25? A lot of these are things that you have no direct control of, like learning about your patients' traumatic experiences or seeing certain nightmares. Still, there is now an increased amount of choices that cause your sanity to decrease. Also, a big change is that as of now, at the start of any day after the end of week 3, your sanity passively decreases by 1. So even if you do nothing to lose or recover sanity, it will end up below maximum.

Today I've decided to work on the second part of the sanity mechanic - narration, dialogue and choices unique to different levels of sanity (low, medium or high). There is now a lot of new dialogue depending on your level of sanity and there still is more ground to cover, particularly events from weeks 5 to 6, which I've barely touched on with today's additions. In fact, the sanity mechanic is such a tremendous change to the way the game works and feels that I would recommend you all to start new playthroughs when Build D drops to experience it for yourself. Not only, as a mechanic, does it add a new layer of planning to your time management as you will have to compensate for you bad choices (or just stressful experiences) with resting in your office on breaks, which will reduce your chances of discovering other optional break content, but it also makes each playthrough feel more unique, along with the empathy mechanic, so that your choices truly shape how the main character acts, reacts, thinks and feels.

Alright, that's it for today, I hope you're all enjoying Build C and waiting patiently for more content.

~ Navypink