Hello everyone! Hope spring has been kind to you, it's starting to get a little too hot for my tastes here.

This month, I've done more work on the backend of the battle engine I talked about in the last log, as well as a few things from the art department. Thankfully that means I have a few funky little pictures to show this time! Let's get right into it.

Getting flashy

I showed off a little animation I added to the card hand last time in relation to the backend rework. You might also remember I mentioned planning to add animations to certain card effects to make them more responsive and tangible. The "Spin the Wheel" card now plays this little visual upon use:

Working on this was quite fun - because of how sparse the visuals of CoG are overall, I haven't really done too many "video game-y animations", so this was a breath of fresh air. It made me realize the game could also use little animations for other basic occurrences: gaining Wgt/Fit/Energy, etc. so you can expect to see those soon.

Catching up on more backgrounds

With the forest cabin out of the way, I've now moved on to drawing the SG apartment hallway - quite a lot of dialogue takes place there at this point.

Despite how simple it seems, I spent a bit of time going over how it should look. There were several things I wanted to keep in mind:

There are already 3 existing backgrounds/images of the apartment building: the inside as seen in the player room, the inside as seen in Gordon's room, and lastly the outside of the building as seen on the map and the SG front BG.

I looked over all of these and tried to include elements from them to make the hallway look more cohesive and so that it reads as part of the same building.

I've gotten notably better at designing and drawing environments, and all of the previous images of the apartment are quite old and clunky at this point. The exterior of the building is probably the most odd-looking of these, and I've thought about going back and redesigning and updating it in the background images.

There was also another thing: how the dialogue has described the hallway so far. I originally thought I made a note that all the doors were to be extra wide – a foresight on the SG's part, but when I searched all the dialogue for mentions of double or wide doors, only the entrance door is ever described; not to mention the door in Gordon's room is standard size. So regular doors it is! I suppose it lends itself to possible "fun situations" in the future.

Aside from the doors, I also put in a few simple props: a corkboard for the SG to share information on, a cheeky mirror so that Stouts can check the damage after a particularly difficult day of work, and of course: an elevator – made sure to include that one in the shot.

And now something from the story

As for things related to actual content, I have two things to share today. As always, I can't really just spoil what happens, so I'll give you 2 images and then leave you with your imagination to go wild!

The first is the usual sneak peek of dialogue from an upcoming scene:

I've been sitting on the storyline for these three (Hammond/Nicole/Edgar) for quite a while now, so it's nice to finally get around to working on it.

And for the second thing, I'll leave you with a teaser for a mystery new character:

Probably the shadiest-looking character I've designed so far. It's the shadow from the cap - I decided to push the stylization a bit harder this time to play into the mystery and intrigue, it's almost like a cartoony design element, even. There's just something about a man who looks like he could murder you in the woods.

Card of the Month

Because the battle code backend update stuff isn't quite finished yet, I haven't implemented any new cards since then, but I'll leave you with a concept for a new card nonetheless:

Gee, I wonder what storyline this card could be associated with?

I've been wanting cards like this for a while now. In the current balance of the game, it feels like one of the most important things is to keep up a constant source of card draws - sometimes when you get unlucky and all the UTILITY cards just end up at the bottom of the Deck, it can really take the wind out of your sails.

And that's all

The rebuild of the battle backend has proven to be a bigger challenge than I thought: I've run into a few bumps here and there, so it's taking a bit longer than I'd like. It should be done by next month though!

As always, thank you for reading and supporting the project!