Shady Characters - Devblog #109

Hey Wizards! Shady Character One here!

Some of you might’ve noted that I skipped last week’s devblog. Well, that was only partially my fault - the main fault lies in the nature surrounding my mother’s city, which I had to visit due to some unforeseen circumstances. You see, the nature there hates me and tries to kill me every time I visit, so I had to gorge myself on antihistamines just so I would not drown in my own snot and tears. Have you pictured that? Well, now imagine what kind of a devblog I could’ve written in such a state. Anyway, I am back now and I am writing another entry.

Even though I could barely do anything last week (and most of the week before that), we still did some work in preparation for the next update at least. Shady Two was busy making new poses and outfits for the girls which will be featured in this one, and I had to implement all of those into the game. I have almost forgotten how it feels to add new poses in. Adding new costumes is relatively easy since I reworked the structure of the girls’ sprites last year, but new poses still make my head hurt sometimes.

When adding in new outfits, we have to work forwards, so to speak. We have all the poses in front of us, so Shady Two just needs to add a variant for the outfits that fits every pose. Easy. When adding new poses we have to work backwards. You need to make sure that the new pose is drawn for every outfit already in the game, and each of those already has its own interactions, so a new pose might be okay for the shirt, but not for the shirt and the mantle, for example. Not only do I need to check every combination that I can think of (missing several of them in the process, of course), but when problems inevitably arise, we need to think how to fix them without breaking something else.

Then, since unlike new outfits which are drawn for new events, new poses can be used for old events too. So I need to go through all the events and think if I want to change anything, and then test the event. Because as soon as I make any mistake in the new poses, the girls tend to do this ->

Completely inappropriate behavior during class. So inappropriate that I need to completely censor it. To summarize - fun stuff. To be fair, it is much more invigorating than just writing text day after day. This way I can look back at the events and see them actually come to life.

So, yeah. A lot of new stuff is coming in soon. Including the beginning of Bassant’s storyline. At least her introduction.

I should probably talk more about her during next week’s devblog. I’ll see you all then.

Shady Character One, out!