hey there everyone! my name's peach. my pal felt and i are collabing on a cute little game called "Equidate" and the title of this devlog is 100% not a joke.

it's in it's earliest stages at the moment we're working on bringing this light-hearted and humorous visual novel to life.

planned features include:

• 2 romance-able equine lads
• a story whose path you take control of as the main character, dunkan
• 3 endings
• 100% gay

you payin' attention kids? this is what   g a m e d e v e l o p m e n t   looks like:

things done so far

• felt and i designed, sketched, and characterized story's main characters
• felt and i did some rough development of in-game universe (lore)
• felt created placeholder sprites and i did some placeholder background images
• laid out basic plan for story
• wrote, coded, and edited opening scene
• fixed all the annoying errors that kept turning up and fixed up terrible typos/continuity errors

i did so much coding today thank GOD for copy and paste!

progress

• added styles to character dialogue so i don't have to constantly copypaste \"
• added those comment bars with endless hypens to make the code easier to read and navigate
• coded the very barest of bones to the story skeleton so that all i have to do is add the actual writing + dialogue
• designed and coded in the affection system so you can finally romance ur fave lad
• added the sprite images to the rest of that intro scene i coded earlier
• added some mid-dialogue "animations" with talksprites
• did some image resizing for some talksprites
• figured out more of the background locations that need to be painted
• struggled™ to understand how to make animations work in renpy

progress

• found a much easier, less time-consuming way to implement talksprites and tried implementing it
• took forever to work (i was almost crying) but once it did i somehow messed up (then i cried a little)
• decided to copy the game in it's barebones, skeleton complete state and labeled it as the pre-alpha build so yay for pre-alpha?
• started converting old code that should be removed later into comments in order to make space for the new talksprite system

progress

• FINALLY got the talksprite system working
• changed around some default configurations in screens.rpy to make it so that i didn't have to constantly define the position of the talksprites
• decided to just let all the images stay on the left side of the text box since it's easily readable that way anywho
• renamed and reorganized SO MANY FILES
• created blank placeholder background images for more locations that'll be important to the rest of the game
• began mapping out a very basic flowchart of the in-game events
• began converting placeholder talksprites with opaque BGs to transparent BG images
• cleaned up code by removing remnants of the old talksprite system
• various bug fixes
• staged the fullbody sprites for the remainder of the second major scene of the story
• horizontally mirrored fullbody sprites for sake of ease until i find an easier way to program that (if any)
• FIXED A MAJOR OVERSIGHT WITH THE AFFECTION SYSTEM

note to self: auto reloading is useful but it sometimes gets elements to display improperly. it's worth closing and re-launching the VN every once in a while to avoid such issues.

progress

• backed up placeholder background image
• felt and i talked more about and fleshed out the story, characters, and setting
• felt and i also talked about workflow and the logistics of transferring files to one another
• we also also got each other up to speed on the progress we've been making
• felt completed the rough fullbody sprite of morgan to use as a placeholder which i then placed in the image directory
• scrambled through so many tutorials it ain't even funny
• files in the images were getting a bit chaotic and hard to navigate so i started organizing the image directory
• replayed the game and realized i gotta re-stage morgan's fullbody sprite in his first scene since its dimensions are different
• finished making dunkan and morgan's talksprites BGs tranparent
• fixed text styles so that now all characters have their own text colors when speaking
• cleaned up character definitions to make them more readable
• made alternative character objects so that text size can be easily manipulated (including automatic quotation mark sizing)
• made dunkan heehaw
• drew up new BGs
• messed with text box customization a bit
• √ cleaned up sides of 2 dunkan talksprites
• √ make gabriels talksprite BGs transparent

to do

• re-stage morgan in fs scene

i hope you like our new placeholder game menu art.

we are very serious artists.

progress

• took a nice lil break to prepare for the work to be done™
• edited individual textboxes experimentally
• it turned out terrible so i'll probably switch them out til later
• brainstorming for more future events to be written into the script later

progress

• forgot to update this whoops
• drew even MORE placeholder BGs (one such BG is above)
• felt and i discussed important business™ things and also features/story ideas to implement!
• wrote in some new placeholder story text B)
• replaced a few lines of code

√ felt todo

• morgan fullbody sprite
• gabriel fullbody sprite

√ peach todo

• flower shop backgrounds (green wall)

progress

• created personal discord for recording progress of the VN, idea sharing, etc
• wrote more for the rough draft of day 1 for the script
• cleaned up misc bits of code
• added more code comments for clarity and productivity's sake, especially for scene labels (makes parsing script easier)
• modified digital workspace for productivity's sake
•  organized coding references
• wrote more rough draft text for platonic route into script

√ peach todo

• flesh out & complete both boy's routes
• make shorthand guide for important code pieces

progress

• made that shorthand guide for coding
• also studied some python/renpy because lord knows i needed to
• modified history log's layout to be more readable and easy on the eyes
• further fleshed out the in-game outline 
• stopped self from going ham on GUI customization since the script is the number one priority atm
• gave myself a headache probably

progress

• super secret collaborative brainstorming and idea tossing
• felt finished final fullbody sprites for all the boys™
• i plugged those pics right into the game yeehaw (required some renaming and code tinkering)
• felt made mockups and final versions of character dialogue text box, plugged that badboy right in the code
• i made mockups of the non-dialogue text boxes
• felt made promo material for the official announcement of the game planned for the near future wheee
• created & organized necessary channels/categories + updated discord server permissions
• began rendering final versions of background art assets
• made small progress with the script itself