♥ Week 2 Devlog ♥

Hi Everyone! Week 2's just about finished, and so it's time for another Devlog!

This week's been a little more focused with the art, which I'm excited to show you! 

- How truckin along's going -

My previous Devlog outlined a couple of goals, and I think I'll go through all of them before talking about any further progress. 

As a refresher, here's what I outlined for myself in week 2:

• - Have Arley and Nanala's sprites to the same point as Hayden's
• - Have a tighter plan with the script ( maybe hit between 10 and 12k?)
• - Have the silly stats screen made into something polished enough to justify keeping?  Or cut it entirely
• -Have  the player character designed.

All goals have been met! (Though it wasn't exactly a long list.)

- Art Updates - 

I started the week out tackling the last goal first.  MC not having a face was really starting to bother me. I'm going to stick with an androgynous character, only considering other options in some non-jam version in the far off future.

I gotta go with my heart and work in a white haired anime character somewhere. Hayden only kinda counts.

I've also ever-so-slightly tweaked Nanala's colors so she better represents the middle ground between Hayden and Arley. I feel the difference is small, but impactful.

Here's a comparison of the old vs new, hopefully this demonstrates what I mean:

Now Nala's a little more balanced , value (grayscale)-wise

And finally, Here's an image to show the progress on the sprites. Now Hayden no longer looks weirdly clean compared to the others:

(Nanala's still a little rough, but we can fix that in Week 3.)

I think Arley might have accidentily gotten taller, now that I do the sprite comparisons. Not fully sure how that happened.

- Words words words -

The current word count's sitting around 11k, which is where I thought I'd be at about this time last week. Things have slowed down to about 500 words a day, which requires me to think and tinker with the project every day, but not enough to where I'm having to exert myself. 

I have a few minor events to still write/fill in some of the blanks, but the general structure is starting to reveal itself. I now know where my endpoint is, and roughly how much it's gonna take to get there. 

I managed to link up all of the different chunks within my game too, so the thing's at least playable. Cohesive/comprehensible to anyone other than myself? Maybe not. but all the text shows on screen and eventually there's a .:GAME END:. where there should be one.

Right now I think I'll be able to have the rough first draft at 15k words. (Maybe. We'll see.)

- Snake Adventure 2 Battle-

I've decided to remove the silly stats screen! From the player's experience, that is. I'm not deleting the code outright.

I'll continue to write the code in for the stat screen so it can be added at a later point, but I'll be commenting it out on the main menu screen for the time being.  It's a nice-to-have, not a nessecity.

I've also fixed that bug that allows the player to have no name at all, by adding a blank name to the forbidden list:

Much better.

- We're thinking about the Music NOW -

(It might be a little too early to talk about this, but) While participating in this Jam, I jumped into the BL VN Dev server linked at the bottom of the Yaoi Jam itch page. At the start of this week, A fellow Jammer reached out to me in DMs about helping out with the Soundtrack- As a direct result of Last week's devlog! 

I'd like to have my stuff a little more together before officially asking for their time, but I'm very excited by the idea of having some original music for JKHA!

As a result, I spent a portion of this week pivoting to finding music references and being able to explain my concept in a way that allowed me to work with someone else- Something I otherwise might have  put off probably until month 2 . This'll probably help with cleaning up the writing, so I'm happy I did it.

Please enjoy these sketches I made while trying to better work out what I want for my characters/be able to communicate that to someone else:

(I hope this all conveys who they are a little better and what I'm going for with the both of them)

- Plans for the future - 

Now that I'm through week 2, I'm starting to see how the flow of things will go for the rest of the Jam.

I'd like the first rough draft of the script completed by the end of week 3 (thought week 4 will probably be more realistic) and then I'll be reaching out to a couple of people to play through what I have for ideas on what to cut.

After that, I'll be polishing up what I have, and focusing more on the characters' expressions and bringing the script to life with those expressions and ATL.  With previous works,  expression intergration has always been done as I wrote, so I'm unsure of how long it'll take as a seperate action at this point.

So going forward, the plan is roughly as follows:

Month 1: Character sprites DONE, Draft of script, Feedback from close friends

Month 2: Backgrounds, script polish, wiggle room for the second 90% of the project/ all things murphy's law

Week 3 goals specifically are:

• - Finish up the script, and have a better idea for the final word count
• - Clean up MC's sprite to the polish of the others
• - Consider roughing out the expressions and beginning to adding them in to the script
• - Make plans with those who I'd like to seek feedback from when they're able to play the game.

And that's about it for this Devlog!  I'll see you next week for week 3.

Thanks for reading! ♥

Just Kiss Him Already!

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