♥ Hollow Victory is Released! ♥

Hi Everyone! ♥

Just a devlog entry covering both the last 3 days of O2A2 (and of course, to announce that Hollow Victory is out!)

 - - - - - -♥  Day 8 + 9 ♥ - - - - - -

Days 8 and 9 were  focused on the remaining tasks needed to complete the VN:

• - Menu Illustration
• - Textboxes and Choice buttons
• - Particles and Finished Code for the Jail Bars

I'll start with the menu. I'm happy with how the illustration turned out! There's even a little custom animation for the buttons as the game opens up, re-using the code for the choice buttons (which were cleaned up and had their color changed):

I managed to re-use the background from in-game, which was a nice time saver!

For the particles, due to the asset limitations, they're actually using Xael's eye whites (as well as BáiYù's snowblossom script!):

Here's the particles with the effects removed. They look kinda weird in this form....(UI finished here too!)

After that, the final challenge was to make the cuts in the bars the way I envisioned (Spoilers in the last screenshot, I managed to do it haha)

They're red for clarity, but basically the idea was to make "cuts" into the bars using white strips, and then when set to multiply, they would be transparent! (same idea as the gap in the bars to show Xael's face!)

I have a cleaned up version of the code (minus the cuts)  if anyone's interested in drawing things with Ren'Py. It looks a little intimidating, but working with it is pretty easy! You can actually do a lot with it too! (Draw circles, boxes, polygons etc)

And that was the Visual Novel pretty much finished!

 - - - - - -♥  Day 10 ♥ - - - - - -

Day 10 was spent more frantically than the entirety of the rest of the Jam, but it was my own doing- I decided I WOULD upload the artbook for Hollow Victory alongside the game (which wasn't the plan originally). So I spent most of the time trying to get every page finished.

I'm really happy with the end result! I think the pages look nice, and the scrambling was worth it:

Thank you again to RaspberryBell for contributing art!!

If anyone's interested in getting a bunch of art + lore about Xael and the rest of Hollow Victory's cast, it's available for $3 USD! ( Thank you to those who've purchased it already, I very much appreciate the support!)

That's all for now! I'll follow up with a postmortem in a week or so- I had a great time participating in O2A2, it was a ton of fun!!

Thank you for reading! ♥