it's the weekend and the day job has let off substantially, the GPUs are cooking heavily. Looks like I'll be going full work from home soon which is good news for this project, for a while there it's been really slippery, back and forth proving it can be done to the boss man.
I want to do more substantive updates now. Given that FEMC and MC exist in the same universe and timeline, just different cities, I wanted to flesh out in the prologue for FEMC (default name Jane) how Neha learned about MC... And setup that their meeting was not actually accidental, given how intentional everything Neha does is. Both as an easter egg and a practical thing.
To facilitate this, and to facilitate future travel for FEMC, I made her an employee / protégé of Neha who is a bit of a workaholic, in the New York region (as mentioned). Neha forces her to take some time off so she can enjoy her life more, day before she herself leaves for Seattle, allowing the gameplay loop of lying on the couch and setting up dates and other mischief on the Bindr app.
Reskinning the phone has been fun, but also time consuming, so I focused more on content because nobody gives a rat's behind about day one styling of the phone. The map itself is identical between MC and FEMC, just markers are different.
As expected, Neha is more of an Upper East Side woman while FEMC is relegated to Queens as living in NYC is expensive for any young person on a salary.
Male MC, UI improvements (the BindrDev cat is gone)
Male MC will also be going to the New York region where he will explore Neha's massive penthouse with her as part of their continued relationship, but also miss Yoon (she will also be available to the FEMC with their own progression, different context).
I've already presented the character selection screen and the shift to more colorful UI, rather than just the black background. If you select the male MC, you will be met with a new, even more robust screen for prologue skipping:
And it wouldn't be complete if I didn't color match everything else as well:
I've also "professionalized" the whole intro cards as the game boots to be more in-line with this and less me venting about the state of the game. Much more streamlined. I've been also working on a custom animation loop for the logo and stuff (not the old one).
I am trying not to show my entire hand here because it's much more fun to discover things when I push this out, but I will make a note of all the new stuff to discover. It's, as usual, fairly straight forward.