Whispering Ledger - Devlog #37: Upgrades, People

Shave your dates, October 14th.

So I've been back and forth about this for like the last two updates, but because it was going to happen eventually anyway after v1.0, I'm going to start using the new style I made many moons ago for all content going forward. Then every so often I'll do like a chapter or quest or something from a previous update, starting from the prologue.

If you've been staying tuned to either the random-art channel in the Discord, or the last few Weekly Roundup posts, those have been using the new style, which I'm pretty much in love with. It also serves the dual purpose of updating the things I did when the game first launched nearly a year ago, with everything I've learned since then.

That being said, and as I said before, due to H-scenes being the bane of my existence, I'd probably do a full sweep of all regular story content, then start tackling the lewds. Because if you hate something, you should do it last so there's just nothing but strife, obviously.

For comparison, let's look at the first meeting with Ashura.

This is actually one of the images that excited me about the project, because of the grand scale. But as I learned more stuff, I started feeling like the pixellation was kind of intense. Here's the same-ish scene in the new style.

It's got a deeper, richer color, with some softness despite still clearly being a pixel aesthetic. You can almost smell the warm sunlight and feel the cool breeze. Now, generally speaking, the farther the object of focus is in the render, the worse it'll appear. Let's look at another one of my favorite images, the big reveal.

This is one of those images where I actually have no problems with. None whatsoever. The goal here wouldn't really be to improve anything, but to capture the same lightning in a bottle, which brings us to the new style.

There will of course be situations where I'm like "I should just keep the old one", and this is probably one of them. Like, I really like the picture overall, and, in a vacuum, it would be an obvious heavy hitter, but being compared to perfection is always unfair. So I would basically gauge whether the old image is consistent enough to not be alarming when surrounded by the newer images.

So another pro of the new style, aside from just liking it better overall because I made it all by myself like a big boy, is that it also provides better cohesion throughout the game. The way things work now is every main character has their own style, essentially, which becomes glaringly obvious when you look at Tyra and Nicole's faction characters. Especially Nicole. Let's look at Sherry for example.

It's not necessarily a bad render, but if you compared it side by side with any image from Ashura's questline or something, you'd notice "Hm, this style is kind of different. A bit more glossy, even". I didn't recreate the thumbs up since this is more of a style examination.

I wouldn't consider this image perfect, but now it fits into the style of everything else. The transition would also allow me "finalize" character designs that I kind of just left up in the air at the beginning. For example, Ashura's tail alternates between being completely black or black with a white tip. In more recent updates, I've finalized "black with white tip".

I wouldn't really consider this a rework because no dialogue or systems are being changed, purely images. It also won't bloat the dev cycle because I've always gone back and redone some images here or there after each update, and I'm not going to say "Hey guys no updates until I replace these 1000 images" because I'd get bored of that shit real fast.

Ultimately, this is a process I will thoroughly hate with every fiber of my being, but when it's all done I'll be like "wurth".