First off, here's a peek at how Dart will first appear in the game:
He'll be wearing a motorcycle helmet! I'm still working on the design; initially I tried making the lens a beautiful shade of amber, which immediately made him look like Master Chief..... I was so mad. 😭 Why does Halo have a design monopoly on amber lens!?
But today I'm thrilled because overall I've made a lot of progress on some things I've been putting off for... months lol. Such as:
Playtesting through the game from the very beginning!
And to my great relief, I loved it. The game is still enjoyable and made me laugh. I have this... kind of weird fear that one day I'll boot up the game, and I'll just find it all super cringey you know? e_e And that I'll be overcome with the desire to rewrite everything, which will be overwhelming and delay the game's completion by quite a lot. But this week I still love the game, through and through! ❤︎
More under the cut. As always, if you don't see a cut: please click on the post to view it in full.
While playtesting:
I implemented the checkpoint system. :) It works great and I'm quite satisfied; hopefully you guys get a lot of use from it!
I added in those choice prompt reminders.
I finally got to and FINISHED adjusting the graphics for the hover choicebox - I've been procrastinating on that for monthsssss and now it's doneeeee yayyyy
Used a custom "dis" transition to keep the textbox from flashing every time an animation plays (special thanks to the player who mentioned this being an issue! I didn't even notice it.)
I started coding Dart's scene, like I said I would...
... and then I immediately got distracted into coding some positioning transforms; each character now has specific coordinates for when I ZOOM into their face to keep them front and center.
The new zoom transforms does mean I have to re-save all the sprites at a bigger resolution... but I've been meaning to do that anyway. ;;; I also started on a couple of Warden's expressions, and prepped Mia's PSD file for expression-drawing.
I alsooo did my monthly file back-up this today, so alllll the game files and PSDs should be safe and sound.
And ah... Yeah. That about covers it! My coding/playtesting sessions are always hugely productive and time-consuming, which is why I can't do them every single week, ha.
One of my favorite things when going through these asks are the moments when I’m getting lost in Mia’s touching honeyed sweetness only to get immediate whiplash by Dart’s cat person snark.
@herotome
I promised last week I'd show off a preview of our actual villain, so here he is rendered by the always amazing Remnantation! I wonder what's under those mummy bandages. 👁️
This CG depicts a missable bad ending in the upcoming installment. That's right, Evil Eye will only appear to angrily kabedon the MC if you make certain choices. We may not be able to kiss him yet, but the UST is palpable.
The back of the default MC's head makes a cameo appearance here. You may remember in the first demo, I've included to the option to "turn off" CGs featuring the default MC to maintain immersion (should you choose a different avatar or not want a depicted MC at all). In this case, instead of displaying the CG, the game will display this masked stranger in sprite form:
WIP obviously, but we've started the rendering process so he'll have that Herotome polish soon. (: Thank you again to everyone who donated on Ko-Fi!
Ultimately I'd like to make sure the CG is still unlocked in your gallery when you encounter this scene even with the MC CGs turned off, I just have to figure out how to code it. This way, you're not missing content if you're aiming for completion. Shouldn't be too difficult.
In other newssss I've just about wrapped up OFFICIALLY WRAPPED UP Mia's expression code 🥳🥳🥳, Warden's tunnel talk scene (0014), and Griffin and Jade's intro (0015). If I can finish Griffin's conversation scene this week (0016), I'll either focus onnnn starting to write Dart's intro (0017) or start working on actual sprite expressions. Because so far I've only worked on CG expressions. 💀💀💀💀
I hope you’re all staying safe and keeping warm.
Much love,
Wudgey.
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PS did you know tumblr mobile lets you do dumb edits to your uploads?
