23/06/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Helloo~oooo everyone!  Time for the update.

I got sick this week. ╰(°▽°)╯ It sucked. (┬┬﹏┬┬)

And life bit me in the backside after being chill for a few weeks. Because of course it did. So it was an annoying week. But let's jump in.

Summary

• Finished fleshing out ending plans. 

• Did some other SEKRET writing

• Worked on UI related things

Writing

So this week I finished fleshing out all the ending scenario plans. I still have to draft some of the content and I reworked some of the endings completely but just having them more clearly planned out is quite useful. Especially since some of them were a little...sparse.

It's a bit tricky since I do want the ending chapters to all flow a bit differently but, of course, with routes that have shared 10 chapters of events, I really can't deviate too much since the logic breaks starts to break down of why characters did X instead of Y when they reached that point of the story.

I think you can justify some variation because sometimes during emergencies or bad situations, the reason you do one thing instead of another does involve a bit of chance. 

But at some point you deviate so dramatically that it's hard to explain why a character does something they didn't even consider in another route. 

So yeah, there's some amount of trying to do something unique for each ending but still within the realm of reasonable possibility for characters.

I also worked on some other writing related things that must remain a secret for now. So...that's all I shall say about it. LoL

Art 

Received a new BG sketch and a new BG. Artists are hiveminding again!

Other

UI stuff!

I have mentioned I wanted to do a slight update of the UI - mostly just sprucing it up a little rather than making major changes. I've been working on redesigning some of the borders and things like that.

What exactly am I doing?

Well these "alien symbols" you see here and there have become a bit more prominent of a design element in certain game screens and I really like the architecture of them and have been, for a while, thinking about pulling some of these elements into certain other aspects of the UI.

I've really been torn on whether I wanted to (it's not THAT much work. I mean, it's not a small amount of work but ultimately it's not too difficult to just remake and replace some of these frames either.)

Thinking about it from a design perspective there are arguments for keeping the UI in its simpler format rather than adding some of the visual "complexity" that these little dots and circles and things will add. 

But ultimately I feel like my reasons for changing the UI are valid and will contribute well to the "unique look and feel" of WSC.

So I'm trying to work some of that same feel that the circle symbols have into some of the rest of the UI.

(this top one doesn't have the overlay behind it....or text...because it's still the mock up. Ha ha. I don't have it implemented into the game yet.) So yeah, that's a bit of what I've been playing around with on the side.

I'm still keeping some aspects of the UI because the new one is actually quite similar and uses the same colour palette so it's not like I'm overhauling every single thing. Mostly I'm replacing some of the borders with new, slightly more complex ones.

And there is another thing I noticed recently - which is actually a bit of a new problem that I have to address.

A recent update to Renpy changed the font shaper so that Renpy now recognises font ligatures.

What is a ligature you ask? It is a special glyph that some fonts contain. A lot of ligatures activate automatically when you use certain letter combinations, and they can add some really cool visual interest to the font. 

These usually appear automatically but in programs like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Affinity Designer, you can select when to use a ligature or when not to and honestly have a lot of control over how fonts appear and what glyph variants you're using.

The problem is that while ligatures look cool...sometimes they really impact the readability of words. This can be fine in something like a logo. But for UI buttons and labels...it's not always desirable.

Gallery looks okay here, but the stacked Ls do kind of make it look like a typo...But the word "Colour" here is a disaster.

When I first started using this font (which has a TON of ligatures and glyph variations), for Stars, Renpy didn't recognise ligatures. But a new text shaper was integrated into Renpy a few updates ago and now...it does recognise ligatures. And you can see how much that impacts the readability of some of the text.

(The top has no ligatures while the bottom does)

With UI, you can sometimes get away with slightly reduced font legibility because often, people are able to contextually figure out what something says even if it's not as legible as it could be. 

For instance, I don't actually like the default R in this font (seen in the image above)...I'd much rather use this variation:

But unless I use only image buttons in the game, which is way more work, Renpy doesn't give this much control over individual glyph variations. That said, even though the default R has some reduced legibility, due to the one leg being extended all the way up to the left top corner, I think most users are going to be able to figure out that it's an R.

But with the crazy ligatures here:

The word "Colour" starts to become a little too difficult to read. 

So the good thing is that this is a fairly simple fix that my friend Windchimes helped me figure out. I just have to add a single line of code defining which shaper to use for the text. There are now two and I just have to tell Renpy to use the old one that didn't recognise the ligatures.

The problem is that I have to do this in multiple places and I keep realising there's yet another place I have to go in and add "shaper "freetype"" - which is a little annoying. Ha ha.

But that is something else I went through and tried to fix this week. 

These sorts of problems being caused by "improvements" to Renpy happen sometimes. Renpy is being updated all the time. Nearly every dev I know has a healthy fear of updating Renpy mid-development due to fixes and improvements causing unwanted changes to their existing code. 

SO anyway. Yeah. I did a lot of this type of stuff this week too.

A lot of other stuff has been focused on the redesign but I did also work on doing mock-ups for some new screens. I'd like to go into some of that but Patreon is really not liking this update. I'm typing about 15 words ahead of what is showing...and then having to wait a few seconds for Patreon to catch up. So I'll wait to do it in a future post.

When I'm really tired and a little sick like I have been this week, it's sometimes easier to work on art related things because it requires less thinking than writing where I have to plan stuff and strategise, and think.

And let's not discuss what my code is like when I code while sick/exhausted. 😬(Fortunately the font shaper code is really simple so I can do that without breaking things. Mostly. LoL)

So yeah, lots of UI related stuff this week.

Upcoming Week

I was hoping to be a little further along finishing up the ending scenarios but the curve ball of dealing with Real Drama (™) and being ill this week threw me off.

Next week I will definitely be drafting. Probably this weekend too as I'm feeling a little better but not enough to want to be anywhere than snuggled in blankets.

So might as well write a little anyway. I'll probably also be working on the UI stuff as well here and there. But mostly drafting.

That is all for this week. I will see you next time! waves in slow motion