The school VN - Somewhere in the Shade - has had some developments in the last few months! I think I've talked about the background work I did in Blender, right? (...Right?) That has been stalled for a while and I don't have much new to show (I need to get back to it and finish them >.<), but I did do a bunch of work elsewhere.
First, the writing. I've been doing a (hopefully final, fingers crossed) pass on the script, addressing some feedback I got from the last playtest session, and improving a bunch of things that I thought needed work. It's been surprisingly slow, as I had lots of stuff in the beginning of the story I wanted to smooth out; the exposition wasn't as clear as I'd have liked, and didn't flow the best, but now it should be much nicer. I think the mid point of the story will have less to tweak, but then the end will probably be more dense again, as I've decided I'm changing the ending a bit. The beats are the same, but I wanted to lean in more on the romance and make it more meaningful. I don't intend to do any more passes after this, and this thing needs to come out already, but while I'm cooking it, I'm trying to make it the best I can.
Okay, second. On the art front, I did a big UI rework a couple months ago! The game got upgraded from 720p to 1080p so everything had to be redone and recoded. The plan had been to have Vick help me with the UI design, but I can't really afford to pay him, and he's a busy man, so I thought it was time I took matters into my own hands and did my best at making a new UI. I did loads of research and went through all the screens one by one, improving them. Here's some of them. First, the most dense screen, the settings menu:
The visual hierarchy turned out to be super important in making the interface read as structured and clear. It's still using some temp assets - the 90 angle boxes can be replaced with rounded boxes, the little blue boxes to the left of each item could be replaced with a more interesting graphic, the background could have a gradient or texture or something - but I think it's looking pretty neat already. Also important was to make this kind of a UI template that I could use on other screens to make them all feel cohesive as part of the same game. Here's the history screen update, for example:
Big revamp of the save/load menu as well. Here's the progression:
And here's the main menu. Not its final incarnation, but it's getting closer.
You don't really see it here, but when you hover over buttons it shows a tooltip that tells you the shortcut key for that action. Also, when you hover over the quick load button, a preview thingy shows up, so you get a sense of where it will take you. I'm currently not feeling the positioning of that little bar with the autoplay/skip/hide buttons, so it's probably gonna get moved. Anyways, there's more stuff going on in this screen that's not apparent, but there's more work to do, and I'll talk more about it in some future update (or leave it for some dev logs.)
The main menu doesn't have anything to show yet, and the pause screen is not very exciting, but that still covers most of the major screens.
Lastly in design news, I did some logotype work! I did font research earlier this year, and then in September/October I did logotype research and tried mocking up some logotypes. I haven't reached a final one, but I think I got some promising work done. Here's a peak:
And that's most of the UI/design news.
In character art news, I finally started work on Haruka's final portrait art! I've been slow cooking this for ages, because it's such an important element. Perhaps the most important element, right? The heroine is gonna be the center of attention for most of the experience, and it's my main area of work, so I wanted to make her as good as possible.
The color scheme's been locked in for a little while, and it's this:
And the two poses she'll have. As you can see, I've begun linearting one of them!
The set of expressions will be distributed between the two poses, so she changes poses naturally as dialogue unfolds. I'm going a bit fancy, doing arm variations for certain poses. I hope that doesn't make things too cumbersome later, but we'll see.
And uh, yeah. That's kind of it for now. I initially wanted to have this thing finished by the end of this year but that's clearly not gonna happen anymore. Between this being a side project that I can only devote so much time to, and it being huge with me doing almost everything, and then life and depression and procrastination happening, it's just not done yet. Sorry. I'll be darned if I don't release it before GTA 6 though. I do really want to be done with it, so I can devote all my efforts to the mommy VN - that game's script is already over twice the size of Somewhere's, and I want to get back to it before I lose too much steam. But yeah, for now, I'll be continuing to slowly grind on this game, trying to finish it out.
I don't do updates too often because I don't always have too much new to show, but hopefully I'll have more to show soon.
That's it. See you soon.