♥ Week 1 Devlog ♥

Hi Everyone! ♥

We're now a week into O2A2, and I'm excited to share my first 7 days of progress! The game's shaping up nicely- I have some things still to polish, but I'll definitely be finished in the next couple days!

Here's a day by day breakdown of how things went for me:

 - - - - - - ♥  Day 1 ♥ - - - - - -

Day 1 was all about the character sprite- I hit a good thing with the sketch pretty quickly!! 

I debated (/am still kinda debating) adding a different head variation but figuring out the rotation on that might be a little tricky... it's that or a different arm placement, so maybe if I have the time.

I also got a sketch for the bg done, and got the bars in place - here's a screenshot! 

(no expressions or anything at this point)

By the end of the day I had a nice clean(ish) version of the sprite! Even some very basic (eye) expression stuff:

Such a moody face LOL I'm very happy with how he looks so far.

 - - - - - - ♥  Day 2 ♥ - - - - - -

Day 2 was mostly writing- I got about 700 words done!

I'm pretty happy with what's  written so far- a big part of that might be that I found the music I'm gonna use! I'm glad to have that sorted so early- normally that's a tricky part for me. The music was nice to write to, so hopefully it's good to read to as well.

I added some more expressions to the sprite, and figured out how to add little cut-in screens (which took AGES......like 2 hours in the evening for a placeholder:

(Completely unnessicary, but I wanna be stylish haha)

I'm messing a little with the Renpy action editor to get some of my fiddly ATL things done faster- I got the entry and exit animations finished too! (and things like Xael now floats a lil too etc)

 - - - - - - ♥  Day 3 + 4 ♥ - - - - - -

(Lumping these 2 days together because there was a lot of non-visual stuff haha)

Day 3 was spent mostly finishing up the script- Now it's at the 1k mark! (Though there's some tweaks I'd still like to make.) I got my sister to play it,  and she liked what I have so far!

I also fixed a problem I was having with Xael entering- LayeredImages in Ren'Py are literally layered,  and alpha affects each layer seperately, so I was getting a weird stacking effect with Xael's assets:

Adding "Flatten("xael") to his enter transform fixed this!

I also spent (most of day 4) deciding plans for my  UI:

Gonna try and add some overlays and maybe some cool diagnal strips into the bars too-( I'll be using a placeholder .png for a little bit in future screenshots.)

I'm a little concerned about the lack of color right now haha; I'll see if I can add some into the BG to compensate. I also found some code that lets me animate the menu in a way I like too: 

 - - - - - - ♥  Day 5 ♥ - - - - - -

Day 5 I cleaned up and then implimented the UI (the button colors still need work, but I like the general shape), and started to mess with Wattson's Wave shader to try and give Xael some weird shadow effects. I attempted to resolve the lack of color problem:

I'm kinda digging it!

Camera angles starting to be added in too to add some pizzaz:

(Code used to fade out the NVL text from here.)

 - - - - - -♥  Day 6 + 7 ♥ - - - - - -

Lumping the last 2 days together too becuase day 6 was mostly making + implimenting all the expressions! (mostly just a couple eyebrow variants, and a mouth or 2, and now the script is 99% finished)

Day 7 was... just the background LOL. Spent all day inking and making it look pretty:

The difference feels huge! I feel a lot more confident in the end result now that that's added in.

At the time of writing this, it's nearly the start of Day 8- I have the Menu CG to add, the UI to finish, and the Renpy draw version of the bars to finish- I also have a couple of ideas for further polish, like maybe some particles floating about.

I'm super excited! I'll be done for sure (with maybe a short recap of the last couple days alongside the release announcement!)

Thank you for reading! See you in 3 days when the jam is over!! ♥