0.4 Development Update 32

Hey, folks!

v0.4.10 went to Beta today, and the work on v0.4.11 continues. Jess is going hard on the writing, there are multiple events and mini-events done already, more on the way, the artist is posing girls for the visuals, and I’m trying to keep up with everything.

Not much to report, everything’s in progress, so have some target renders. No final visuals as of yet, the way the updates get prepared sure changed a lot, but it’s for the best, I think.

Lyriel’s going to get a new repeatable activity:

(and she just can’t keep her shirt dry)

This is from the pizza event:

And another thing that is pretty minor, but still kinda important. I finally got around to making a new sprite system. The sprites will now be separated by the time of day, both the girls and all the backgrounds will be shot with the same FOV, camera positions and as similar lighting setup as possible, so it should all look much nicer:

It’s still not perfect, of course, and it’ll never be, but it is a stark improvement, I think. With the game getting dangerously large even when compressed, I'm looking forward to offloading the less important talks to the sprite-based sequences.

The only downside is that the new sprites take quite a lot more work than the old ones. I do multiple shots in-environment to get the reflections right, and then cut out and refine the sprites partly by hand. So I’ll probably only add Lyriel’s sprites for the next release, and then will update others. And I’m going to have another go at evening lighting for her sprites, too.

See you soon!