I've been busy with remaking old renders for the better part of the last two or three weeks, and that portion of the content is now finished. My current focus has shifted onto expanding the story in Liam's adolescent years: meeting Marla and her family, Lani's various growth spurts, etc. This has essentially meant making a lot of alternate versions of the girls... Marla has no fewer than 5 character models representing various ages, and Lani has 4. Along with that, we have different hairstyles and wardrobes for each of the age sets, so it's been a fairly arduous month trying to get all of that sorted and configured properly. (On the bright side, this has given me an opportunity to try out some alternative tools for hair and clothing, which seem to work pretty well so far... I'm still not quite comfortable with the new hair simulation settings, but the actual creation part of it is pretty good.)
Here's the most recent progress log (strike out is finished):- Office scenes- Miss Kitty scenes- Park girls- Liam is born- Liam speaks- Meeting Marla & Bess- Meeting Ronny- Marla's first words- Mom introduces corn to baby Liam- Lani has her first growth phase- Liam's first story- Storytime time progressions- Ronny dies- Lani ceremony- Marla ceremony (rehash of previous, probably sprite-only)- Liam ceremony (cinematic)- Lani falls from the tree- Lani finds a box- Hoping to add in another changing room scene, since I have some new outfits to put into the game.Asset creation:- Ages for Lani- Ages for Marla- New Luna models (pregnant and non)- New Horace model- Bess model- Ronny model- New Temple complex
I know it looks like I'm only half finished with renders, but a lot of these are really small scenes (two or three images). The really big thing that still needs to be finished is the temple complex... I intend to only model out the new exterior and a single room for the ceremony scenes, so it's not like building an entire building. Still, there really aren't any premade assets that mesh with what I want, so I'll be building it all out by hand, which always takes a while.
Aaaaand that's the current state of things. It's going steadily, but also more slowly than I had hoped (I know, you've heard that before). To make matters a little worse, we're going on our annual family vacation in a few days, so that's one week that I won't be working on the game. Ultimately, I think we'll see a new version hitting testers probably around the end of November.
I hope all of you are happy and healthy. Cheers.