Gloomy Village
This week has been… hard-working 😎
It's probably the week that had the most drastic changes to the game ever since development on it started. I'll start from the beginning, but I'll most likely forget a few keypoints because there really have been a ton of changes.
Updated all chibis in the game to have smaller heads, because it looks better although it took some time. Updated the clothes (helmets) as well.
Added minimap functionality to all the maps, and every character supposedly has a big character portrait icon over them that's only visible in the minimap.
Added more atmospheric lighting to the Village, the design of this level is still a work in progress as I want to make the developing content here more dramatic through the usage of ambient sounds, possibly rain, and other effects.
Finishing the UI updates by Friday ✅ Finished all the necessary UI changes, there's only the character window left and the inventory window but those aren't a priority right now.
Updated the dialogue avatars to use textures for maximum quality and easier image manipulation during dialogues. See below how only the character who's talking is fully lit up, it also allows me to make some character avatars fully dark when they're in shadow and the player isn't supposed to know what they look like yet.
Fixed an old issue that was very annoying, which was causing textures to look messed up during movement, especially textures with a lot of details.
before
Removed compression from all the textures in the game. I realized that compression on semi pixel art sprites makes them look... pixelated. So this month's release will most likely have the most faithful render of what the art assets are supposed to look like.
Added glowing effects, other lighting effects, visual effects, working on a weather system as well…
Updated a ton of sprites in the older maps, both pre-ISA and post-ISA maps, to look better.
And that's not even all that was done, there's a lot more that's just too much effort to remember what it was and relay it properly, so it's probably best if you'll see the game yourself to compare.
Monday's tasks from below haven't yet been completed, but progress has been made on them so they'll move on to the next week.
Draw new maps using tile rulesets for the new upcoming content in the village.
Work on cutscenes for the newest content and finish adding all dialogues required for the outdoors part of the village for the stamps gathering quest.
I've learnt a lot more about Unity this week and this has allowed me to do many things in a much faster way compared to before. Because I was unhappy with plenty of things especially the messed up textures during movement, I couldn't not focus on those details before moving on with continuing the sequences in the outdoors part of the village. Due to the new additions including the visual effects for rain and so on, it's possible to develop more atmospheric sequences as well so that's an added benefit.
I hope you're happy with my progress, because this week there were probably 12-13 hours of work everyday, all for the greater purpose of actually being in a proper state for a Steam release in a year from now.
Have a nice weekend!