August development update:

Good morning/afternoon, patrons. I hope your day is going very, very well. Today I'm here to talk about the current state of development of Summer Days 2: Mainland, and I want to relax a bit to tell you what's new, so let's get to it.

Art:

The art section of the game is doing very well. Although the characters are not so many, the reason for the delay lies mainly in the variety of poses I'm doing for each character. The sprites will have different poses (such as casual, phone in hand, cleaning, thinking, etc.) and each of these poses, obviously, must be done. Accompanying each pose I have to adapt the different outfits, which is not very complex to do, but still something that needs to be done.

In the Game section I'm going to talk a little about a change I started to make a couple of days ago and how this change affects all the sprites I already have made, as well as it will affect the next ones, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Narrative:

Although I have always had a more or less fuzzy idea in my head about the final destiny of each character, during this last month I was able to provide secrets and narrative details to the game, thus giving you the players a reason to explore the world proposed for Mainland. As the story is the central pillar of the game, I am not going to talk about story details. This small section is simply to comment that, in narrative aspects, the game is going well.

Phone:

A section that I hope fills you with hype like me, the use of the cell phone is the most novel feature of Mainland with respect to the first game, and that will undoubtedly give you something to talk about.

The Internet in our world is the greatest tool we have. There we can watch whatever we want whenever we want. And, although Summer Days 2 is not going to have such a... "wide" network, there will be a handful of web pages in which little secrets that happen in the game universe will be revealed, all while the player explores the city.

In addition to the public pages, there will be hidden pages, which can only be accessed via pop-up ads that will lead to pages that are not normally allowed to be accessed. This system is still in early development, so it is still subject to change with improvements in the accessibility of such sites after the first time, etc. 

And this is just the internet! Each phone application will bring different things to the game, including being able to ask out friends or partners by phone call, for example.

Gameplay:

This section is the only one in which I won't talk about some innovation I developed. Although it won't be noticed in the game, the sprites are divided into body, upper clothes, lower clothes, head, eyes and mouth. 

Faced with a problem, where I noticed a great slowdown of the game (excessive demand on the PC) was when I chose to make small changes that greatly improve the final performance of the game. I am reducing the dimensions of each file in the game, and I also reduced the frames of the characters flicker animations, in order to lighten the game.

Although I have not yet tested these changes with more than one character on screen at a time, the increase in performance is more than noticeable and will undoubtedly make the playing experience even better.

It's been long months of development, in which I find myself working during ALL my free time to bring content, either drawing, programming, editing, writing, although the artwork is almost finished for this first half of day 1.

Still, I'll probably be uploading alternate poses of the characters so as not to leave you without content, as well as showing you the final cell phone designs of the main characters. 

The first Alpha is getting closer and closer, and although I still don't dare to give a date, I can estimate that by September it should be ready.

Thank you very much for your support. You are the best!

Raptor Art.