lol totally fair critique! There's got to be a more efficient approach than what I chose, but I'm not a programmer and had to operate at the limits of my ignorance, while still getting that feeling that you're watching a low-end version of the game play itself. Fwiw I did compress every image down as far as I could, which was a long couple of nights unto itself lolsob
Go glad you had a great time and really appreciate the feedback! It's nice to have those many many (many) hours given some love.
haha i honestly dont blame you. its better to make something unoptimized than not at all. and yes im impressed with how standardized and compressed the photos actually are. in the order of kbs for most of the ones i saw! doubly so it makes it easy to grab some of the ashley bubbles as pfps haha
seriously, this is such a work of art. the browser version plays very smoothly. the writing, jokes, and witty quips are very enjoyable. thank you for creating this
lol yep, i share the philosophy. better to exist imperfectly than not at all. breaking down all those video clips into still frames and stop-motioning them together was the only technically feasible way for me to make the game feel visually cohesive and still have that old adventure game vibe. but yes, please feel free to utilize all those ashley profile pics, which were also painstakingly created lol
Again, thank you so much for the kind words! Warms my heart just knowing the game is still bringing people happiness. And considering the browser version can be touchy, I'm really glad to know it played smoothly for you!
If you get a minute, be sure to leaving a rating/review!
oh i didnt even know you could leave reviews on itch and my account is years old haha, just left one!
did you use gmod to do the ashley animations? or how did you pose everything? and what was your workflow for compressing those thousands of images?
I had some trouble running the windows version, but thats probably because im running it through WINE on linux with 12 yr old hardware haha. game would crash, textures longer than expected to load, or load on half the screen. either way browser let me play just fine.
I actually used a posing program called XPS/XNA Posing Studio that's low weight and relatively streamlined for basic posing and animations. It was my first time working with 3D models (outside of watching my partner at the time using stuff like MikuMikuDance) so I'm sure there's better ways to do it, but yeah, I basically just grabbed publicly available models, imported into XPS and posed everything by hand. Workflow was really sloppy initially, but I got more organized as I went (e.g. making proper saves of pose data so I could elaborate or alter as needed). Made poses in batches based on how the writing developed, did annoying keyframe animation when I wanted something fancier, and created some Photoshop action sets to streamline the visual touch-ups.
Getting all the images followed this basic process: 1) record video from my PS4 version of the game; 2) manually screenshot frames that I wanted; 3) run a batch of screenshots through a Photoshop action to ensure they were all cropped properly to fit the game; 4) manually edit screenshots where needed (to remove UI elements); 5) run a batch export to give them sequential naming convention; 6) after working a batch into the game and pruning as needed, I ran the final files through TinyPNG for compresssion (I bought a year of premium just for the volume processing lol). Thinking back on this... wow what a huge pain in the ass lol. I was a younger, healthier person then.
You just never know what kind of hardware situation people are bringing to your game lol, but that's genuinely useful to know! What browser did you use?
And thank you so much for the kind review!!
