Hello everyone and welcome to this end of week update for Dead Heat!

We apologize for the lateness of the devlog, Sunday was taken up with personal matters and Monday was spent working on some of the mechanics we will be talking about here. So we decided to push back the devlog to this Sunday to give us more time to finish up on some elements. This was also the final week before I will be entering University, so I want to get as much done as possible beforehand. 

This week, we began work on the badge camera that you will be able to use to gather your photographic evidence to use in your case. This mechanic has been a part of the design document for over a year now, and we now feel confident enough to prototype it.

The mechanic is nowhere near ready at this moment in time. It will take many more days before it becomes what we want it to be. In the meantime, we need to focus on more widely used mechanics such as text selection and hotspot interaction.

We released the WIP demo for Dead Heat to receive feedback for gameplay features, graphics and sound, to make sure that they all work well before we move on to make sure we don't build flawed mechanics into the game. We've received great feedback on the atmosphere, but also feedback on issues with the interaction boundaries. They seemed to require the player to get too close to interact with the apartment door while in point and click. We are working to fix this issue with the help of Chris from Adventure Creator. 

Highlighting text is also an area that we are returning to from the previous 2D demo. Text selection will become a big part of the dialogue in Dead Heat, allowing the player to focus in on individual phrases an NPC has made so the player can focus on them for a new thread of dialogue that will reveal more about the NPC.

However, the older demo was never meant for direct control with a gamepad. Before we can implement the system into the new demo, we will need to make sure that the dialogue is fully navigable with any gamepad the player may choose to use. This meant that we needed to rethink how these interactions would be handled. They could not be handled by selecting the words directly and would need to be handled by key pressing so that controllers would not be at a marked advantage for reaction time. In the new demo. The interactions will be handled in the same way as quick-time events. When you see coloured text in the NPC's dialogue, press the correct key or button on a controller to build your response on that aspect.

We will be adding in new coloured text instances in the future, one of each type and wrong types to help get people accustomed to how the system works in-game.
Be warned, choosing a wrong interaction may lock off future chances at the right aspect later on in the conversation!
Something else we worked on this week and last week was cleaning up our patron page. The page had sat dormant for a very long time due to a lack of patrons and time for us to put into the page. Now that the game has been updated, we can update the page with new screenshots, up to date information and more realistic goals and rewards. Rewards we will be able to fulfil.

https://www.patreon.com/DeadHeat

We will be opening up our Discord in the new week for fans to interact with us, ask us questions directly and to get regular news updates on the games progress. We hope to see you inside!

Next week we will aim to get the evidence camera and lay the groundwork for the randomization elements implemented.
Thank you for reading our devlog!