Progress Report

The Many Faces of Adrian... The Unseen Expressions!

Howdy, y'all! Just checking in, letting you all know progress is good! I've been dropping more fine grained progress updates in the Patreon section of Discord for those who want more, I'm just trying not to spam you all with emails for every little thing - trying to strike that delicate balance.

So the latest is that the UI is fully implemented and fully functional! Yep, it's working great! I'm still fine tuning some of the behaviors and improving the overall experience in little ways as I continue working, but the current task is the massive one I've been dreading! Which is going through every single existing piece of content and adding reactions for Adrian. Which is to say every time he speaks, he will appear in his portait with an expression appropriate to what's going on... (or inappropriate, in a number of cases!)

This also extends to the segments where other characters are narrating: they too will appear in the UI as appropriate. 

There's also now a silhouette that appears during narration. Of course, this silhouette changes with the narrator. These silhouettes also appear during sex scenes right now as not to distract from the good stuff (and because CurryCatz really doesn't want to draw a bunch of porn faces lol). 

As part of this whole UI overall, a number of other changes and improvements have been made. For one, the previous UI consisted of around 80 different images, mostly variants on buttons. Every single button state was pre-rendered in photoshop and exported to the game files before being linked together with code. This time around, the UI only consists of about 15 pieces with things like button states all being handled in engine with the coloring, transperancy etc all being applied in real time. We've also gone ahead and moved a couple of other small systems to being rendered live as well, and we've removed the old phone call UI in favor of simply folding that into the new interface more or less as-is. Another change is that the previous UI was all in PNG format. The new UI utilizes the vastly more efficient webp format (that was largely responsible for that update last year where the file size of SIleo dropped by more than 50%!). 

All of this is to say that this update has saved a bit of space, resulting (as of right now, at least) in a smaller update. We've also observed performance improvements on some systems! 

Anyway, as of right now, the expressions required for the Intro have been fully implemented, and Diego's route has been done up to the beginning of Day 15. I plan to finish Diego's route tonight and make a start on the colossus that is Tai's Route. Hopefully this process shouldn't take more than another day or two (cough famous last words) after which I can essentially call the new UI finished and move onto something else! 

I'll report back when everything is in to let you know what I'll be doing next!