Hi, thanks for the feedback. When you say end of the gladiator fight, do you mean at the train journey back after the tournament has finished? That is where that event is supposed to end - I just want to make sure something isn't going wrong during the gladiator fight because stuff happens after that. The end of content situation has been a long term problem that I'm still working on. It's gotten much better than earlier version, but clearly still needs some work. For the next update I will be changing the button states from just not being there, to having the button with "No Content Available" written on it instead. When the hub screen is introduced, is does explain that if the envelope (contracts) or star (character events) buttons aren't displaying, then they have no more content. But I appreciate there is hours of story to get through after that before you actually run out of content, so its easy to forget.
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I've made good progress and the entire adventure for 0.2 is now transferred into renpy and coded. All the sprites and backgrounds are done and most of the animations are as well. I've started adding in the music and ambience today. When that is done it will be time to add the SFX. This bit can be time consuming to source and identify appropriate sound effects. Sometimes I also need to cut multiple effects together to get it sounding right, but fortunately not very often. It gets quicker as time goes on because a big part of the time sink is sourcing the effects . Over the last 6 months I've bought multiple license free sound effects and music packs from Humble Bundle and many of those also include subscription or credit for online services that provide these effects. Once sourced, they can be reused, writing in the scripting to use the effects doesn't take particularly long. After that I'll need to run through it for bugs and grammar fixing etc. and then I should be good for an early access release next week, I'm guessing Wednesday/Thursday and then public release a week later.
This last week has been quite good for learning and I definitely feel that my confidence with renpy is growing. I've spent some time making the character stats system more robust. In the future I'll be adding screens that record your scores and what the possible maximums could have been. These relate to choices you make during the adventures and there are no right or wrong choices. But each choice is likely to increase a different stat, so by design you can't have a maximum score in all stats. I've added in another notification system that will allow me to let you know when you've made a decision that could have repercussions later; completing a mission with an order, balance or chaos outcome, retaining an item, a thing that may allow you to do something different in a future update, for example.
I've also discovered how to adjust the colour settings of sprites within renpy (beyond just applying a colour filter). This is great because I can generate images in dark and dramatic settings, but they become more challenging to make into useful sprites. The tool I use to change facial expressions often struggles if parts of the face are in shadow. I found this out too late for the images generated for this update, which involves a lot of time in dark environments. In future I can generate the images without the built in darkness (or with it toned down) and use the inbuilt renpy functions to make them more dramatic looking.
Even more interesting; thanks to Youtube's algorithm, I have discovered FramePack. This is an image to video generator that I can run on my own PC and it was fairly easy to setup. It takes about 5-10 minutes to generate a 5 second clip, but can generate up to 60 seconds in a single clip. I've messed around with 10, 15 and 20 second clips and they don't end up becoming the horrendous warpy mess that some of the other video generators become in longer generations. However, it's nowhere near as good as the big popular generators I've been using for most of the animations. It's a lot better than WAN2.1 at consistency and most videos it generates are coherent, which is a big plus over WAN. It does NSFW and because I'm generating the images on my own PC there is no content filtering at all, so I can start with clearly NSFW images and animate those. I'm still getting the hang of it, but there will be a few animations from this in 0.2. It tends to have very limited animation (it's weirdly good at dancing but most other things tends to be stiff and very limited movements), so these are really only for adding a bit of life to a nude sprite, but that's better than nothing. I can easily set it up on Runpod to get access to much more powerful hardware to generate the animations on. That comes with a cost of about £2 an hour, which isn't horrendous, but still enough that I can't be too gung ho about it, but useful nonetheless.
Only a couple of screenshots this week, just to prove I'm doing stuff. Also I want to keep a lot of what happens later on a surprise and there isn't much I can show from what I've been working on this week that wouldn't give it away.
2 weeks since the game launched and I'm in a pretty good place for version 0.2. 15,000 words transferred and adapted into renpy now and about 11,000 of those are now "done" as far as setting sprites and backgrounds. Some of the sprites will be re-used so it'll be a little quicker to do the final block. Hopefully this time next week the full guild adventure will be done. Then I'll need to add sound effects and create some animations to go in and it will be done. It is my birthday soon and I've got some time off, but my wife has filled most of that time off with stuff to do, so that's a bit of an unknown.
It's given me a better idea of how to do the updates. I'll aim to do a major faction mission with each 0.X version. And then do a 0.X5 version where it's focused on the smaller character stories. So 0.25 will see an 'at home' stint with personal stories around Emelia, Lilly and Sarah. If I have time ill try to put another visit in with Isabella. Possibly in 0.2, if not by 0.25 ill add a link section in-between the events of the farmhouse and Alex's graduation as it feels a bit sudden how it is currently. Not something I want to spend a lot of time on, but just a small montage type thing. I'm also going to play around with the font, likely just remove the custom font for speech. I thought it would help make it clear that it was switching between speech and narration, but with the side images I think that's clear enough and the speech font is more of a distraction than it's worth.
I've included a few screenshots of the current build. For patreon ( patreon.com/JubsGames ) supporter tiers I'll add some more images and clips later this evening, including some NSFW stuff. I want to show more of what I've done so far with 0.2, but I don't want to risk ruining the (hopefully) surprising stuff.
Just a quick update on what I've been working on in the week since the release...
Firstly there are a couple of little errors that needed correcting. The MC's un-customised first name appeared on a couple of occasions, so those have been corrected. I've had a few people point out that having the background videos play on repeat is jarring, so I've begun adding a no loop condition to them. You can still replay them by scrolling back and then forward again, should you wish. There is a video in the prologue where my taskbar is visible on it, so I'll redo that one. I wasn't particularly happy with it anyway so it's a good excuse. I'm also going to increase the transparency on the text box, I'm not sure I want it gone altogether, but I do want it much fainter. Otherwise, it seems to have been a pretty good response for a 0.1.
I've switched to writing the story in Word, so I can better track grammar and spelling. I was previously writing it in renpy, which doesn't do any of that. It also makes it harder to see how the written words flow. So hopefully doing it all in Word and then transferring it to renpy will improve that. Speaking of which, the first adventure is written, came in at just over 18,000 words. It's focused on Emelia and the MC finding his confidence and his feet as a protector. There's a concept image of him for the cartographer's' guild first mission included.
I've transferred the first 2000 words into renpy. It took about an hour, including some of the choices and stat tracking stuff. So it's probably about 5 hours to do the whole lot (I'll get much quicker at it than I did for the first one). I've got all the raw images I need for the characters and their various different outfits and statuses. I've started making the first sprites, which is the most time consuming bit of the graphical stuff. A sample of which for the outfit Emelia begins this chapter in is attached. There are usually at least 3 versions of each sprite, sometimes more, for different facial expressions. Most of the backgrounds are done, some of the background animations are done as well. So.. overall I think progress is good. I'll have a better idea of how long it will take before it's ready for release this time next week, once I've had time to do the sprite work and start getting them into the game.
