Posted May 02, 2025 by aura-dev
ITCH | MEGA | ITCH-DELUXE | MEGA-DELUXE
We are back with an SKA month, although, there is not a lost of visible progress going on in this prerelease week.
As a reminder, we finished the last SKA focused development month by doing a bunch of code refactorings to make the code more reusable for Liora & to support translations. Over the past month of Liora dev and also this week, we did some cleanup work to stabilize our technical changes. That being said a couple of things did happen in March on the SKA side (although I have already reported on them during the Liora devlogs and we did do some redeployments of the build to deliver bugfixes to the translators).
But to summarize, what's different in the new prerelease build: First, as mentioned in a previous devlog in Liora, I integrated the new Lady Charlotte character artwork. The pixel artwork is still in progress by our pixel artist MemorableMan, so the current one is just an approximation I created through RPGMaker assets.
Also, on the pixel art side, the animations I reported on last month have been deployed in this build.
On the translation side, to clarify the community translation status so players can adjust their expectations, I updated the build script to compute the translation status for each language when creating a deployment. Also, the first iteration of the translation plugin used to load all languages and synchronously, we have improved this so that the loading happens in the background and only when requesting a new language in the options. (This caused a several seconds lag at the beginning of the game which should be gone now)
May will be the last month with a refactoring focus for our assistant developer Trihan (remaining tasks are making the book system reusable for Liora as well as the costume system.)
As for me, besides working on this week's prerelease, I have also started the artist search for Liora. I have gone through over 100 applications x_X We have a couple of promising candidates but nobody who has fully convinced me through their portfolio. Also our current artist, Emubi, has brought up the possibility of full-time hiring the assistant he brought in when we increased the art budget two years ago in order to work on both projects. I will most likely repeat the process from last time and also give him a slot in the upcoming artist poll so that we can set a baseline and have a fallback option. (This is all assuming that his assistant would want to accept the proposal of working full-time for Emubi.)
Finally, next week, I'm back to content dev in Arwin's mansion!