Devlog: December Report (2021)

Happy Holidays, everyone!

In today's devlog I would like to share a preview of the upcoming build, which, surprise surprise, will be a graphic update actually!

• Character portraits

While I'm slowly working on Kegar's next part of the story, I decide that it's high time to finally unveil my plan of updating the character portraits, just like I was teasing back in March (whoa, it's been a while). A quick refresher: the idea was to implement a FXAA (fast approximate anti-aliasing), which will smoothen jagged edges of the hard-pixel character portraits:

This whole process wouldn't be that hard to pull off, if only the character expressions were saved at the same layer that the base (the body). Unfortunately, that's not the case (due to optimizations in the assets size/quantity), and so, I had to think of a workaround to the transparency issues, like you can on the pictures below:

In the end, I decided that the best solution will be to ~simply~ redraw the character expressions in a higher quality and then scale them down to match the OG resolution. This way, I can avoid any problems related to the assets transparency like seen above.

And so, I did that with Angus as an example, and... I have to say, I really like this approach, although it's super difficult to recreate the exact same look of the OG pixelated expressions (I'm doing my best though!)

So far I managed to recreate the entire Angus's and Kegar's expressions sheet. If only I will have enough time, I'll try to implement the complete Rowley's sheet in this upcoming update as well. (And then, Arthur's in another).

As for the body layer, every picture (including Victor's cameo at the end) already got updated with the FXAA treatment, along with some other touch-ups like the contrast or smaller fixes here and there.

• CGs update

The second big part of this graphic update are the CGs. I've already finished drawing the two most recent ones (from Rowley's story), however there's still two more to go (one related to Arthur and one to Kegar, which is already halfway done).

I'm quite positive that I will be able to finish all of these for this update, which will basically make the whole CG gallery up to date!

Here's a small preview:

So, to sum it up:

The upcoming update (v.0.17.1, December 30-31th) will be a big graphic update (character sprites, CGs) which will also feature proofreaded Kegar's most recent part of his story, and which (assuming that I will be able to pull everything off in time) will be the most complete version of the game so far.

As for the next update (v.0.18.0), it will of course, be a continuation of Kegar's story - just please give me more time to work on his part, because there's a lot I want to cover there =)

And that will be all for now!

Thank you for your support and I'll see you soon, guys!