Hi all, and welcome to the fourth devlog of Knight George!

I am a bit late to the party but... Happy new year everyone! Let's hope 2025 will be a better year for game devs than the terrible 2024 and its endless layoffs, even though it is more than likely to continue. As for Knight George, what's coming up this year? Lots of good things!

Let's start with something we started to work on during the last month of 2024: the dialogs! Several players pointed the fact the dialogs were a bit hard to follow, as the small screen size only allows for two very small lines of text to be displayed on the screen. We tried a few things, such as increasing the size of the box to display three lines, but it ended up covering too much of the screen. We then settled for the solution of having the text scroll whenever the player moves to the next two lines, which makes the text much easier to read overall!

Technically, this is used using Game Maker's surfaces: the text, previously broken down in as many lines as needed, is first drawn unto a different surface, and this surface is then drawn onto the game screen. By moving the text up, it exits the surface, making it scroll for the reader!

It is not totally finished (you can see above a few pixels of the box outline is cut) but offers a much needed improvement to a game that will feature its fair share of dialogs! It will also be used for the quests and letters screen.

Other than that, the work has been mostly put on some optional minigames as well as one village, but I'll talk about it later. Oh, and I can't wait for you to hear some of the soundtrack Isabelle has been making!

Quick note to end this devlog: I intended to present the way an enemy is designed, from the initial sketches on paper to the final product, but with the holidays and everything I did not have the time to do it properly. Tune in next time for that, and once again, happy new year!