Road to v0.4.4 - (Progress update)

Hello everyone, MateDolce here! It's been a while since I've talked to you guys, but I've been working hard on the upcoming update, so here I bring you a progress update of the next release.

I think it's understandable what I'm trying to explain with this graphic, I've tried to organize it to make it easy to understand. I have avoided using progress bars in the past because not all the tasks have the same complexity and others are difficult to define unless I already have everything more advanced (like animations). So I will talk about the progress I have made so far.

Progress update

As you already saw in the sneak peek, one of the scenes to be animated is almost ready in terms of assets (I won't go to rigging until I have both in case there are parts that I can reulitize), I would like to try animating the eyes in a different way, controlling the eyelids and iris separately as it will bring a lot more expressiveness to Mia, but I still haven't decided if I should do it yet.

I've also improved the encounter sprite a bit, I'm sorry I have to waste time on this but I can't help it, it was out of tune with my current art level, and the way I'm using sprites now (with talking animations) ends up saving time in the long run. Once I have all the sprites updated I can replace them from the start of the game. The normal sprite is also on the to-do list.

Other than that, I've already modeled and rendered almost all the backgrounds. I haven't advanced with the writing/programming but I will focus on it once I have the key assets drawn. The update changes quite a bit depending on the result of the park scene with Mia, requiring 2 different scripts (although it uses the same assets).

Release date?

Once again I want to thank you for your patience with me, I probably won't be making any special drawings for christmas because I would like to finish the other scene to animate before the end of the month. This update will probably only touch on Mia, leaving a partial cliffhanger in order to finish this arc completely with the v0.5 update, which includes several things that would bloat development time too much (gallery, kana scene and other stuff). I can't promise that the update will be ready by January but having the assets ready to animate would leave me half way there.

That's all for now, Happy Holidays! I hope to bring you some good news early next year. Bye!