♥ Week 4 Devlog ♥

Hi Everyone! Week 4 is now done with, and we're almost at the end of the first month of the Jam!

I'm surprised at how enthusiastic I am, if I'm honest. I was planning to have some kind of break around this point to refesh a little, but I'm still pumped to keep working!

- Splitting everything up -

Started the week by splitting the giant script.rpy into script (common route) arley.rpy (arley exclusives) and hayden.rpy (hayden exclusives) . Felt pretty good about the exclusive content each route has! For some reason I thought it was a much smaller amount. It's around 5k for both, which leaves about 7k for the common route. Not bad! (And that's only counting the differences in events, not the small line changes I have throught each section)

- Aaaalll patched (nearly)-

Made decent strides to fixing up the script- Not everything is patched perfectly just yet, but we're close. Word count's sitting around 17k, and I think the final will definitely be  <20k.

Good Progress!

I've cut out a few scenes (most notably the 3rd date) and moved a couple things around so everything flows better - I'm still needing to work on some stuff towards the end, but the rough of the first draft is close to complete.

Things are getting a little more difficult with the writing, but that's more about having specific problems to solve (How do I make these 2 scenes flow naturally into each other? What do I want for this particular scene?) vs writing freely whatever comes to mind.

It's still probably my biggest paint point right now, but is it outright a PROBLEM? I don't think so. I'm so floored by the 17k I've managed to write this month, I'm sure I can handle <3k more + some revisions.

- Their faces change! -

Started on expressions!  Continuing the precedence set out in earlier weeks, Hayden's sprite's (more or less) complete, with Nala's lagging behind a little:

(MC's sprite has yet to be touched, but their deadpan expression seems to match every dialog line ok enough for now LOL)

I'm trying to keep things simple/efficient, and for the feel of the VN I decided to incorperate a lot of Anime-type symbols into the mix. I like them! They'll be fun to pepper into the script:

I'm having more fun with these than I'd like to admit.

For now they're just static .pngs, though one day I'd like to have them as full on animated effects.

- Going overboard - 

Later in the week, that idea of keeping things simple went out the window as I decided to get a little silly and split (Hayden)  into his  individual parts and assemble within renpy instead- Mostly becuase I was dreading the sheer amount of exporting it'd take otherwise.

It all started when I decided to change up the lower lid, requiring me to seperate out several images I'd made already:

People may not SEE that 3 pixel difference in the lower lid, but they'll FEEL it.

I had a few hour spare at work with nothing else to do, so I decided, "Why stop there?":

(Probably will be split up further in the future)

 I then pieced together the expressions using renpy's composite feature, before putting those into a layered image:

Building blocks

LayeredImage Assembly 

I'm not sure how many OF these expressions will make it's way into the Jam version of the game, (I'd like to keep the amount of expression changes leaner than a change every line, my norm) but they'll be useful in the future when I go back and spruce everything up.

I want to reiterate I'm aware at how excessive this is, but I need to indulge somewhere.

 I wouldn't reccomend doing this for a Jam project for anyone else. Depending on time, I might just keep this system for Hayden and make the other images less complicated.

Arley's sprite is extemely simple in comparison right now.

- And that's a wrap -

And that's everything for this Week! 

I'm (almost) finished with the first month! The entire game jam is 8 weeks and 3 days, so I'll just be dividing the months into 4 weeks and ignoring those last 3 days for final touchups/last minnute panic to be included into a postmortem after the jam has finished.

I'm feeling super good about how the Jam's going! If I can have another month like the one I've had, I should finish pretty comfortably.

See you next week for the start of Month 2!