06/20/2024 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Time for this week's update. It's been a bit of a crazy week (and I've lost all sense of time so I completely did not realise that today was Sunday.

Summary

• Error Fixes

• Released Early Access to Yellow Tea and Up

• More work on Episode 2

  • Writing new glossary entries

  • Sprite staging

  • New SFX

Writing

I didn't really do any significant writing as the only things to write between episodes are bonus scenes and glossary articles.

I did write a couple of new glossary articles but that hardly counts.

Art 

This week in art, I received a new BG from one of the BG artists. (Yes, there are STILL Backgrounds I don't have from much later chapters.)

And that's about it. LoL

Well, I did once again revisit the idea of some background animations.

I am always torn on these. I think they are fun and can add some life to BGs but I always find non-natural settings don't always lend themselves to worthwhile animations. And certain animations can be annoying...

For instance, having stars actually scroll past the windows on the ship seems like an obvious animation but honestly, I find that kind of thing dizzying and annoying, and wouldn't really want to put it in the game.

When you're in an environment like a star ship, that severely limits what animations you can even include.

If I can only manage to fit animations into like...2 BGs, is it even worth the effort then?

Anyway, the point is that I played with some animations for a few days then retired them once again. Rofl.

I just can't help but feel animations are more suited to natural environments - of which this game has...few.

Coding and Other Stuff

This week I knocked out a few more of the preliminary things for the next episode - marking down where SFX go and locating new SFX needed for upcoming scenes. I marked down any new BG variations that will be needed as well. 

I'm not adding any new assets into the game yet as I don't want anything past episode 2 actually in the build until Episode 2 is out to the public.

But I want to have everything ready to go in.

I have been working on sprite staging (again, this refers to just showing and hiding sprites at the appropriate times, screen positions, and zoom levels). I always find it easier to set the sprite staging first, then go back and add expressions. The staging takes more conscious effort and consideration, where expressions are a much more mechanical process.

For now I'm still working on the staging through chapter three and I am just going scene by scene to make sure everyone appears when they need to. Later, I'll go back to add expressions and to make sure they're wearing the proper clothes, etc.

No testing but there are a couple of bugs in the early access version of the game that have been found and smooshed.

Upcoming Week

Now we are in kind of a lull. Patreon access will last for about a month before I move Episode 2 into public release.

In that time I'll be working on getting the Episode 3 content into "beta" format probably.

This means getting the basic content (bgs, sounds, music, and sprites set up properly). And that's what I'll likely be working on through the next few updates.

I haven't quite cracked fully into doing CGs yet but that's because I tend to dislike doing multiple things at once. I much prefer to focus on one thing until it's done, then do other stuff.

But you never know, I may also hammer out a CG or something. We'll see!