Original Description:
Well how's that, an animation that was supposed to be done last year completed a year later. That seems to be happeneing a lot with me actually. I did the same thing for the Hero animation. So after a bit of paranoia regarding making her unable to say whatever she wants whenever she wants, I bring you an independence day animation. Hurrah! Here's hoping I didn't accidentally use any brtitish spelling.
On that topic, my initial thoughts were to try and insert as much "America" into the animation that I could, hence the stars and stripes on the question menu and the American style font. This forced me to try a new method to embed fonts (or rather, learn how to do it properly to begin with). It's also why the bar down the bottom looks a little like it's made of gold and emeralds.
Anyways, what can I say about this one, well first of all a big change in the plan. I was originally going to make it so that your machine would activate whenever she says the taboo word. However I soon realise that this would offer very little feedback or sense of accomplishment to the player. You could make her pregnant scrolling through the questions really quickly and have no idea what she said or when she used the taboo word. It could even happen during her idle speech. This lead to the creation of a button to accuse her of using the word, which forces the player to have to read the speech carefully.
Of course, the creation of the accuse button lead to a design issue in and of itself. Players could still, in theory, spam the button to their hearts content, destroying the point of the animation, leading to an easy win. I had to include some kind of punishment. Patricia being a kind of gun nut presented the opportunity to have her use a gun on the player, in the same way Hailey could use her frying pan. However, while that worked in Hailey, it's harder to have the same thing block your progress here. I considered having the gun actually kill you, but I don't like the idea of forcing a restart for a simple mistake, especially if it happens near the end.
Eventually I realised that tedium and obstruction of vision are probably the best punishment, so I had the screen fill with bullet holes that are deliberately very visually obstructive. To go with the tedium part, I added a way to remove bullet holes more quickly and considered a way to remove them instantly, which would make Patricias breasts invisible to the player. However, I realised some players would prefer her that way and mess up on purpose, so I left it out. Overall, I think it's a sufficient means to prevent the button from being used carelessly. Another problem that emerged was that having a lot of bullet holes runs the risk of lagging the game (in fact, it probably still will for some users), so I had to come up with something else that happens if you keep provoking being shot. Having the screen fill with static seems an appropriate penalty.
There were a few things that felt tedious to add, but were necessary to the feel of the animation. For example, for a while, clicking the accuse button correctly would immediately cause Patricia to expand, but this meant that the focus would very quickly from the button to her belly in order to see it grow. I considred a second button to make this happen, but in the end, it was a better idea to make a laser, and therefor a short delay, allowing a good amount o0f time for the focus to shift. The glow that occurs around the button was a similar case. It was kind of hard to tell when the button was avalable for use (naturally the delay is so that she can't be accused the literal second she opens her mouth, and you spend some time reading the dialogue. It also prevents you from accusing her when she's not saying anything).
The help gem is a new addition inspired by the old quistion mark logo on classic sierra games. It seems like a fairly intuitive idea, but lets see how well it works. One can't always be sure about these kind of things.