hi everyone !! this months newsletter might be a little short as a lot of my work has been solely asset creation and its a little hard to talk extensively about that.. but that doesnt mean i didnt get a lot done this month!!
the resprites are about 75% complete !!
im really happy with how theyve turned out so far, i put a ton of care into getting them to look right because i really dont want to redo them again for my sake and all of yours ..
here they all are so far !!
the final 3 will be finished soon, keep an eye out on my twitter for that !
for fun, i also thought id share a little timelapse in case anyone ever wanted to see a bit of my process when it comes to these (ibispaint timelapses dont show undos which is probably for the best)
im not super great at anatomy so i kind of just trial and error shifting things around until it looks natural,,
ANYWAYS, next big thing im sure a lot of you are interested in is my work on actual battle mechanics, which i started the month heavily focused on before shifting focus towards spritework .. i did however finish dareks first set of skills !! some info on those below:
each ingame day youll have a choice between a set of skills to learn, so these are the skills darek has to choose from on day 1 (which is what ill focus on balancing for as i work on early game enemies)
im still trying to figure out just how i want these to work, currently my goal with the day 1 skills is to have them be sort of situational and niche so they do still have value but they arent huge game changers too early on, as i implement enemies besides the standard player characters ill probably play around with costs and buff values and such, just see these as a sort of first pass for now
as i said, the majority of work this month was on spritework, so unfortunately thats about all i have to show off beyond that .. ill have more indepth combat stuff to show off hopefully next month as i wrap up basic spritework !!
as for the last major change, battles now support 6 characters !!
in the past the goal was to support all 12, but because rpgmaker has a low resolution by default (that id rather not adjust due to having to remake ui, backgrounds, vfx, etc) it was very hard to cohesively fit all 12 into one screen, not to mention how tedious it was selecting skills for everyone .. but ive found 6 is a good balance !! plus look how nicely they all fit onscreen together...
my biggest issue is not being able to have all 6 characters health/energy/blood onscreen at the same time, as i originally made to ui to fit 3 and the most i can do for now is have it cycle through displaying everyones health on their turn .. hopefully i can find a more elegant solution for this eventually.......
lastly, you may have noticed i redid the turn indicator icons !! the old ones felt out of place on the ui, as i just reused old scrapped art that i didnt want to go to waste, but i wasnt satisfied with them and figured these would be more fun to look at anyways .. i think they came out very cute !!
to wrap things up, ill touch on my current longer term plans..
ive been restructuring how i want the prologue to go significantly, i was never really happy with the original ideas i had and i want something that fits the overall narrative better now as thats gone through so many changes since i first came up with the prologues structure.. hopefully within the next few months ill have more to share regarding that !
otherwise, as i wrap up basic spritework, i want to begin working on some earlygame enemy designs so i have something more grounded to use for skill/stat balancing as you most likely wont be fighting prologue-level versions of the cast members anyways so its a bit hard to balance based on that right now
that means sooner than later ill begin work on the patron zombies for those of you in the highest tier!! of course, ill be very clear about when thats happening, but im excited to get around to that and i hope you guys are too .. more details about that when the time comes !!
thanks everyone for your continued support as always! it still means the world to me and im really grateful so many of you are as excited about my game as i am, you all seriously are my main motivation for working on this thing and i wanna get this thing done for you guys as soon as possible, so thank you again for both your support and your patience and i hope you all look forward to everything this month has in store!!