Friday Update - January 7th, 2021 (poll)
Hey there, true believers!
This week was stressful. Very, very stressful -- and for non-Mythos reasons. I'm naturally not going to get into it, but I'm pretty sure everybody gets it. I'm mostly recovered today!
Yet Mythos work has been continuing. With the new Ren'Py update, and help of a fantastic coder, some nice graphical effects are being added to the game! Stuff that wasn't possible before is going to be worked in to the first release, which means I have to go retouch a few earlier things. It didn't really cost me much time, thankfully.
Also, each of the main cast are going to have full-body pan shots so you can get a good look at them. For example, your first view of Rain:
Work continues apace, though now I'm doing a slightly more "out of sequence" approach -- plotting and designing things that come later in the update so that when it comes time to pull it all together I can do it all at once, instead of working on each little piece as I need it.
That may not have made a lot of sense, so for an example: Rain's intro scene (pictured above). I made sure Rain herself was made and the scene was set up. Then I wrote the scene, making notations for when I planned to have the pictures switch. Then I used those notes to do the renders. It goes a lot more smoothly now!
You may be wondering -- "Teri, how the hell did you do it before, then?"
Um. It was kinda "hey, I know what's in this scene. Let me design this NPC, now pose her, wait she needs a chair, let me find a chair. I don't have a chair? I gotta find a chair asset. Cool. She's posed. Now I'll write the scene. Oh, she should stand up now. She has no shoes on? Let me find shoes."
Have I mentioned this was my first time making a game? It's become readily apparent that I'm an author and not a coder, artist, or project manager.
As always, I have my fellow devs to thank -- most of them have been insanely helpful to me as we share our practices and experiences. Heck, sometimes I even get to tell one of them something they didn't know! It's... it's super-rare, but it happens.
You may have noted that there was no Tuesday post this week! Well... I kinda ran out of Chapter One characters to interview. So hey, here's a poll for y'all to let me know what you'd like to see on Tuesdays until the game drops!
As always, I love (almost) all of you! I'm still tirelessly plugging away at the game, and hopefully my perfectionism will make this wait worth it. 😁
Keep the legends alive!
- Teri 💜