OCTOBER SHOWCASE

It’s the end of the month, so it’s time for a masterpost! This month I’ve focused pretty much exclusively on CG scenes and character sprites. There’s a fair few so it’s probably better if I just line them up:

You can see our protagonist Leith, his three knightly love interests, his family and a few NPCs (for lack of a better term) at the end there. You can see the family sprites have some alternate outfits; the plan is to give the knights some clothing variety too, the game lasts for a year so it’d be a bit weird if they never changed clothes.

I had actually finished the protagonist/love interests sprites before this month but like the really clever person I am, I’d made the sprites a single layer only so swapping out their clothes would’ve been a nightmare. I spent some time converting them to multiple layers, sort of like one of those paper dress up doll things:

(Bigger version here)

I’ve done the same trick with two other NPC sprites – the noblewoman and nobleman. There are a fair few nameless noble characters, so I made one super-modular sprite that can be used for all of them. I should’ve gone for a less distinctive pose in retrospect, but you live and learn:

Leith and the love interests now have a full set of facial expressions with interchangeable brows, eyes and mouths. This allows for a possible 3,456 combinations! Of course some of those combinations look really weird and so wouldn’t be used but still:

The expressions can get pretty nuanced, like here where I tried seeing how many disdainful expressions Lyall can make (answer: a lot):

Obviously, the family sprites have a stripped down expression set since they don’t need over 3000 expressions, and the minor characters only have a few each.

Ok, that’s it for sprites! I still have quite a lot of work to do there but the majority of sprites needed for a game demo have been completed now. The other thing I’ve worked on is CGs, including the opening of the game:

Last month I added some writing to the first game month that let players get a better feel for the love interests. This month I’ve worked on the CGs for those scenes and I’m pretty happy with how they’ve turned out:

That’s about everything. I started a new day job at the start of October so development has slowed quite a bit – I expected as much, but it’s still annoying. I’m going to work towards having a demo release at the end of November but I have the sneaking suspicion I won’t have time to polish or test it, so it may end up being December instead.