Hello my MODDERS and MODIFIERS!!
With the end of the month ever closer, it's time to do a status update, and there are a lot of new changes to talk about!!
For a TLDR:
Development is progressing well, and this will likely be the last Status Update for 0.4.0, since I hope to be able to announce the Polishing Phase at the beginning of next week!!
So let's go over some of the changes and challenges I've been working on
Hidable Dialogues
To start with a very simple one that is also pretty self explanatory. Now you'll be able to hide the text boxes by pressing the H key.
Originally this feature was just something I did to be able to take screenshots of the game, but I figured I could also make it available outside of in-engine.
Visualizing height
An issue that became immediately apparent since I was planning this update was - how do we show Mia's increased height?
I could have gone with the boring route of just having the App say "Mia is now X feet/meters" - but I don't really like things being that precise.
Also I have no clue how the imperial system works.
So I came up with two solutions for the issue
For sexy scenes, there will be a Player sprite!
While scenes until now were mostly POV, it was never a rule I had set up for the game, and I think having that sort of rule would limit the kind of scenes we could do in the future.
For MODIFICATIONS, the solution was different.
I didn't want to have the Player sprite during dialogues, so instead I tried to come up with something else to show her new height.
As I had mentioned while developing the Bimbo update - I like to have something on each path to make it feel distinct, and this time, it was to have wall measurements.
Basically, at the end of each MODIFICATION, the Player and Mia will put themselves against the wall and see the difference!!
I really liked the idea, since it is pretty simple, and it allowed for some fun/teasing writing scenarios.
It also was a good way to keep the "rough estimate" heights I talked about in the previous Status Update.
The MODIFICATIONS scenes this time are quite interesting.
I think the first 3 are some of the most """"lovey-dovey"""" stuff I've written so far, while the last 2 are probably some of the horniest yet.
It really has a little something for everyone.
Complex Animation System
So, all the way back when I was doing the initial 0.1.0 version of the game and developing the dialogue system the game uses, I created a way to make simple animations during dialogue.
I personally don't like it when VNs are too still, so I wanted some animations to make things feel a bit more alive. Stuff like Mia bouncing when talking, the various effects, camera movement, etc.
And while the system I did works very well for all of that, it was limited to only simple animations, not stuff with multiple keyframes, easing and transitions.
Because of that, the growth animation on this update was meant to be simple. Mia has size A, grows to size B, done.
However, while it did not look bad, I did feel like it missed a little impact.
I wanted the growing to feel like it was "pushing", if that makes sense.
However to have something like that I'd have to develop a whole new complex animation system with all those things I mentioned before.
...
So I did that...
It was quite a technical challenge, since I always try to have my code be reusable, so I can do different things in the future for other paths, but after a few days of slamming my head against the keyboard, I'm pretty happy how it turned out.
It also means that in the future I'll be able to do more fancy animations during dialogues! (only when the situation asks for it. don't want to overdo it)
Art time
So the art this time took a long while.
I really tried to push myself to do fancier posing and situations. I've also done a bunch of artwork for "mini-scenes".
Originally Mia's sprite was also only meant to increase in size, however I felt it was missing something, so I made her shirt shrink (technically the shirt stays the same size, Mia is the one growing)
That's about everything I have to share for now.
For this week I'll be working on writing the dialogues and setting up all the scenes and artwork I've done.
Unless there is some issue, I hope to announce the Polishing Phase early next week.
This update really grew to something much bigger than I originally thought, but I'm really happy how it has turned out so far.
In the meantime, I'll go back to my dungeon and continue writing smut under candle light.
Ⓣ