Uproar Overhauled

And we are now in session for the latest devlog of Uproar in Bug Parliament!

On today's agenda, the matter of debate will be this small game that yours truly created originally in one week for the Godot Wild Jam. After that, a boss was added and it was published for mobile on the Play Store.

But then, the audience may ask, what of this project? Shouldn't it have been cast away in the depths of abandoned endeavors, alongside hundreds of game prototypes? Negative, my colleagues!

I hereby declare that Uproar is now ready for release. Whilst this first chapter may lack a proper ending, as well as the following chapters entirely, it constitutes an appropriate experience for the learned player.

Okay, I'll stop pretending to be a parliamentary speaker now.

New features and improvements

Right off the bat, when you start the story, you may notice that the Parliamentary Plaza was completely overhauled. It's bigger, so much that you can drag the view now!

Regarding dialogue, now characters have speech bubbles above them. Nothing extraordinary, but it makes for a nice comics-like layout and better centering of the player's attention. And it allows for fun little transition animations.

The design and accessibility of Examinables is much better, especially on mobile, because now you can long-press to see where all of them are located. As to their new shape, they're (almost) all squares with very rounded borders. Also known as circles.

The story and plot have been thickened. Instead of the flat gentleman Dr Spider as protagonist, we have Doctor Scaramouche, a knowledgable but timid fly orator with an Ancient-Greece theme and a mysterious past. He has an assistant now: Cassandre, a young red ant, ultra-competent expert in politics since she was a larva. Not very motivated though.

The one we have to help is now Bernard Hermit (is he an old friend of Dr Scaramouche…?), which fullfills the same role as Aphid in teaching us the way of throwing sick beats- I mean, rhetoric. His intro spiel has a lighter touch, now that Cassandre is here to contrast with Scara's optimism and complain about ending up being late to today's session.

Regarding the bullet sequence, nothing really new, mostly quality-of-life improvements (bullets have an outline, they fall in the same direction, more feedback once you reached the threshold, etc).

Once you step into the assembly… whoa! Our fellows from the Ant Party went from indistinguishable expressionless lads to fully-characterized compatriots! And there's one more of them; can you find the new one? (Alas, it means the Bee Party is no more)

Fisher is a drunk fisherman perpetually lacking sleep. Explorer is way too enthusiastic about everything. Weaver wants to be a fashion entrepreneur. Carpenter… hasn't changed very much actually. And Farmer is a mighty brute with a shovel. That ant even killed a rhinoceros once. Without using the shovel.

There's a new scene: the Cafeteria. In it, you can read the news! Or more accurately, the three articles that have any purpose in the story. Sorry if you wanted to read the whole paper, this would probably take as long as playing the whole chapter.

For a more lively setting, I also added chatter in the background of main dialogues. Some of the characters also got cool new animations, like Warrior, or Jeepey the new journalist. I don't know why but I can post the gif here, it triggers an error on itch.io.

And the boss battle got a major graphical overhaul! (No screenshot, because spoilers!)

And finally, music has been improved. From the title screen, you can access the music room to listen to all of it. I'll post the new OST on YouTube when I have the time.

Apart from all the new features, I improved the code base. For instance, focusable MPs inside and Examinables outside have the same logic. Every little event is ready for binding effects to it for some more polishing.

And the source code is now on Codeberg! https://codeberg.org/cagibidev/uproar Great in case my disk completely fails, if someone wants to continue the project after it ends, or if you just want to look at the code (please don't judge me too hard). Game code is under the MIT license, and game art under the CC-BY 4.0 license. So it's a FOSS endeavour, with room for commercialization.

Next steps

The current ending isn't the definitive one. It's the same as the previous version (named 0.2, that's right baby, semantic versioning + expectations of instability¹). I won't tell you because as temporary as it is, it's still a spoiler.

1 - Why in English do we say "unstable", but "instability"? That just confused me a bit. Don't worry for some of you, Uproar is still available in French!

A few bugs and pain points remain. For example, even though this is released as a PWA, there's not really any offline support. Also, when you tab/focus out, I had to stop the audio because the music player would hang (but I added a setting for that). And speech bubbles are sized automatically, so they aren't very optimized sometimes. Most importantly, the real ending isn't ready, but at least the rest feels good enough for release.

All that aside, I hope you enjoy Uproar version 0.3. This should take a bit longer than the previous version, but no more than 30 minutes unless you really take your time. If any bugs happen, let me know so that I can proceed to figuratively bang my head against the keyboard once more.

On that, see you on the next one!