17/10/2021 Patreon Devlog (Patreon)

10/02/2021

This Week's Summary:

• Tested new CG for Ari's route
  • THE EYEBROW RECKONING
  • Edited the CG
• Completed Caissa's flowchart set up
• Completed Lance's flowchart set up
• Started coding Caissa's flowchart
• Sent Maggie's route for testing??? Was that this week? I think so! LoL
• Corrected Maggie's route

The Ramble:

So my main focus this week was, of course, flowcharts and working to get the rest of the route flowcharts set up and ready to go.

I was able to get Caissa's flowcharts set up and partially coded. I also got Lance's flowcharts set up. Caissa's flowcharts are occasionally a bit convoluted so they took a bit of time to work out. There are a few places where the branches are too many and connected in strange ways and I had to essentially flatten out the flowchart a little just to keep it manageable. The same was true in Jack's route.

All the flowcharts are a simplified view of the branching but this is more extreme for Caissa and Jack.

I should have Caissa's flowcharts coded in a few days and will be able to release his route for beta testing.

Then I'll start coding Lance's flowcharts.

The other big thing I did this week was work on a complex CG for Ari's route.

While there are obviously 9 CGs in the demo, none of them show Morgan and a Love Interest. There is only one that shows Morgan at all - and she's by herself. So this Ari CG was sort of a way for me to play around and test out exactly how the image layering is going to need to work and how I'll have to set up the image when Morgan has an LI to interact with in the scene.

I definitely learned a lot about how the CGs are going to have to work.

And I learned that the eyebrows are currently just too much.

The eyebrows have always been a bit of a point of contention. They are honestly a lot of trouble to have customisable but I somewhat let myself be guilted into adding lighter eyebrow options to the game.

The three darker colours are universal - meaning they're the same across all the skin tones. But there is no way that I can find to make a universally nice light brown or light grey eyebrow colour. The eyebrows get lost on some skin tones or else look really, really odd on the darker skin colours making them useless from a practical standpoint for darker skin tones.

I wrote up this huge, lengthy explanation about the problem with the eyebrows and ultimately the "tl;dr" version is that because the three lighter eyebrow colours couldn't be universal across skin tones, it was causing a lot of additional work when it came to saving and setting up the CG code. Recolouring eyebrows isn't hard, but having to save dozens of eyebrow images per CG, then code them all actually *is* tedious.

My options were:

1. Remove the lighter eyebrow colours so all eyebrows are skin-tone universal.
2. Avoid showing Morgan's face in as many CGs as possible.
3. Definitely avoid any CG variation combos that involve Morgan's face moving or changing because that doubles the number of eyebrow files I have to save and code.

I went with the first option.

The two lightest eyebrow colours were the main problem so I removed them from the game. The dark grey is not skin-tone universal on the sprites but will be in the CGs because it's only negligibly darker on some skin tones and I think it won't be a problem if it's darker in CGs for some skin tones.

After making up my mind on that, I had to slightly alter the customisation page so the two lightest colours are no longer options to be selected. And I went back to make some edits to the CG for Ari's route.

(To be fair, I also put Morgan in the wrong outfit and had to change that. LoL. Need to remember to always double check what the sprites are actually wearing in the scene and not just assume that I *know* because I might not.)

I also did send Magnus' route for testing on the 10th I believe - which would have been right after last week's update. I think.

Today I went through all 22 pages of suggested corrections and fixed things based on recommendations. Caissa's route will be the one going out next when I get his flowcharts completed. Caissa's route has already had a round of alpha testing but that was, of course, pre-sprites and music. I've also made a lot of edits to Caissa's route actually.

When I first finished writing, the word count was around 711,000 words and it's over 716,000 now. So I've actually done a fair amount of adding content. LoL. Of course.

But Caissa's route has been worrying me for a while so I wanted to make some edits to try to drive home the fact that Morgan is where she has chosen to be; even if she doesn't entirely like her situation and is, for a least a time, having her movements limited by Caissa's father.

I'm sure there are still plenty of typos to find in the old and new content.

So...yeah.

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

.This week, I don't really have much to show in the way of screen caps because I didn't do new coding or anything - beyond flowcharts. And I'm not ready to show off that CG of Ari's just yet.

So nothing for this section this week.

Definitely next week.

Upcoming Week:

More of the same. Flowchart set up and coding as well as some CG work most likely.

I intend to get Caissa's flowchart fully coded and will then release his route for testing and move on to coding Lance's flowcharts.

Then move on to working on Jack's flowcharts.

I'll probably work on some CG stuff in between here and there.

And that is all for this update! Look forward to some CG sketches next week!