エピソード・ゲーム・アップデート2 / Episodic Game Update 2

Hello, everyone!

It's time for a small update on the game's progress. I made two small sections to explain a bit how the game is coming along, one for people that want the basic info on progress, and another one for people that want some insight on how things are behind the curtain! Let's begin...

A game needs a name!

So, when we wrote the last report post, we still didn't have a solid name for the game. We thought about it for a long time, as we wanted something simple, but still related to the main series in a way, so we came out with an idea...

小学校の外伝: 今日の中央町

... or, the english translation...

Elementary School Stories: Today in Central Town

... or, if you want the way we refer to the project ourselves...

Shoggakou no Gaiden: Today in Central Town

With this title, we relate to the main series, and we also add that simplicity!

Game progress report

So, in the last game update report, I mentioned that we had our protagonist ready (his name is Shou!). We spent some more extra time adding more expressions, details and clothes, to achieve a bigger variety of combinations. So far, we are happy with the current batch, and we'll be moving on to the secondary character (more news on him soon!). It's way easier to do more characters once we have set up a stable system with Shou.

Our main objective with the character assets is that, despite having to spend a little more time in this initial development, we will have everything ready for the following episodes.

Adding to that, we already have the sound department ready (it was easy, since we didn't need to add that much variety in this regard). We also added a small "personality" system that will change depending on how ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶b̶e̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ you make Shou behave! (His personality is brattish with a slight hint of sweetness, buuut... Choose some options, and he would end up being as serious as a rock!) Of course, this will change how some characters react or interact with you.

Right now, we are working on adding more conversation paths, and finishing the small details on the plot line for the first game. Once that and the backgrounds are ready, we will test it and, if everything works as expected, release it!

Aaand yeah, I know I mentioned that I wanted the game to be ready by the end of March, but so far, the progress is good, even if we are working a bit slower than expected. (Sorry!)

Behind the curtain

Warning: This part might be a bit nerdy or not interesting if you are just interested in the game. Basically, I'm just going to talk a bit about the dev process so far!

Assets, assets and more assets!

So, one of the first mini-problems in the way was the amount of assets that the game can have. Even just for Shou, we have around 10 different "clothes", and those have around 12 body poses, and then 150 different expressions for them. That adds to a monstruos number of more than 18,000 different possibilities, and since the assets need a left and right variant, thats more than 36,000! All in all, that means we have around 28Gb of assets just for Shou! (My poor HDD is suffering)

Luckily, we found an easy way to split those assets into a simple and easy to store way, slicing them into small cubes, and then keeping only the different cubes. That makes the assets drastically lose weight , and then some more when the game is packed!

Reusing? More like recycling!

One of the things that takes more time to develop is the foundation for any project. Be it the engine, inputting the data, or creating the assets for characters, it's always time-consuming when you start from zero. Thankfully, we made sure our engine is solid enough for this and any future games, and by working on Shou's assets in a modular way, we can use parts of his asset file to create new characters easily. Thanks to this, this first episode might be slower, but it means that new ones will be way faster, and so will any games that we are also working one (looking at you, prequel!)

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Aaaaaaand, I think that mostly wraps it all up! We'll keep working hard and keeping you updated with small sneak peeks like these!

As always, thanks a lot for your interest and support!