Hello everyone and welcome to our end of week devlog for Dead Heat!

This week began with the fix of a minor error with Sonja's model. Her older model (1.03) had a slight error with her earrings. They had a habit of floating in mid-air when she moved her head. This was due to her earrings not being weighted properly during building.

This was corrected this week and now Sonja can move her head as much as she likes and her earrings will be right where they are supposed to be!

The next task for the week was to fix up a new menu for direct movement. In the older demos, the information the player needed for highlighting would just be in the center of the screen as if the mouse were still there. We set about fixing this by creating a new menu for direct movement methods that the game would switch to when they were active instead of the normal interaction menu.

We soon came across a problem that was linked to an issue with the quality of life. In the old demos, if the player wanted to interact with something, they needed to cycle through different icons to find one that actually worked with it. This was due to the interaction method being based on choosing an interaction and then choosing a hotspot. This was unusable with direct movement in the way we wanted it to be, so we changed to choosing a hotspot then an interaction that hotspot has an action for. This is a much more efficient way of doing things and is already easier for us to test the game with.
The new direct menu takes some inspiration from Fear Effects direct menu, using a black bar to clearly show interactions and information for the player on screen.

We will continue to add and iterate on this menu in future.

The last thing we wanted to add to the demo before the week was out was the inclusion of the memo into the apartment.

This will be part of the safe puzzle. We will hopefully have that ready by next week.

We are hoping to get a lot done next week. We want to finish off Phase I by polishing up everything and refining what we have for Phase II. Our timetable for Dead Heat is to get the vertical slice demo ready before September, so next week may see the completion of Phase II and Phase III; which includes randomization elements and user-generated evidence. Both are areas of experimentation for us.
We will let you know how everything goes on our twitter as usual.

Thank you for reading our devlog! We hope you will stay around for the next!
Also, we have finally updated our woefully outdated patreon page, so if you would like to support the project, the page won't look like it came from two years ago! I'm also debating whether or not to delete the old patreon posts since they aren't really relevant to anything anymore.
Either way, we hope you will consider supporting the project. Funding will help us work with better equipment and hire new talent for new art and sound assets!

https://www.patreon.com/DeadHeat