September Progress Report

Writing

Another month, another pile of work completed! We've honed in on the storytelling aspect of the game this month. This effort was of course in supplement to our normal artsy and coding endeavors. This is the most challenging aspect of the game's design to share, because it is by definition spoiler incarnate. In the interest of keeping secrets secret, I'll sum up our pile of writing work as roughly 40 pages of scene flow and dialog authored by us this month.

This work encompasses the script needed for out first playable demo, in addition to extra content which is available in the first 2-of-7 days spent in the game. We hope you'll enjoy it when it's available!

Art

We're working on going over some of the earliest character designs and driving more of them towards a final main pose. In particular, we've continued to refine Lizzie and Stella.

Lizzie Default Pose WIP

Stella Default Pose WIP

Aside from these two images we're sharing today, We worked on backgrounds, a handful of new side characters, and a whole slough of sketches for the cheesecake scenes stuffed into the game. You can look forward to at least some of these when the demo goes live.

Main characters aside, those aforementioned side characters are ready to be seen by you guys and gals! Meet Patricia, Nillson, and The Professor!

Patricia

Nillson

The Professor

You'll meet these three runts during time at A2Z!

Coding

This'll definitely work. There's no way it can't work . . . False start. Okay, this time it'll work. -- Ryhn

Ryhn has been hard at work coding the storytelling framework that miniBoss uses. He wants to ramble at you guys until you run away screaming, but we're not going to let that happen. Instead, here's a strictly bullet-point driven update from our coder bun.

• Added support for 5-characters to co-exist on screen at once
• Wrote incineration and security scanner shaders for use in necessary scenes (Snorfly, noooo)
• We can now mirror character rigs on their x-axis without breaking their expression sub-systems
• Authored new animation sub-system which allows for arbitrary position, rotation, and scaling of characters in sync with their dialogue being delivered. (Ninja kitty, go!)
• Added support for varying character sizes: 512x512 up to 2048x2048
• Authored new animated loading screen system.
• Auto-save and load system (tracks decisions made during play)
• . . . aaaaand a butt ton of bug fixes!

Ryhn's focus for the next month is on implementing the script mentioned above, because a pile of shiny new tools exists to be used! He'll of course be adding new shinies to said pile as the need arises.

As always, thank you so very much for your support. You guys n' gals rock, and the project is a healthier, happier thing with all of you around! Many hearts! ♥ ♥ ♥

'Till next month, stay cute n' classy!