Naradno Dev Log #2 - Music, More Concept Art & Gearing Up for a Pre-Alpha

In the last dev log I said:

Most of the codebase is done; I can reasonably finish the game without touching it up too much.

So that was a fucking lie. I'll get to it later.

Music

The music! I have music to show off. Such an integral part of video games in general and visual novels in specific. I'm very lucky a friend saw a post I made on itch.io and offered to make some tracks for the game - at the top of this post you'll find a small part of a demo they made for it. I love it, super exciting!

The work-in-progress album art for the game's soundtrack

I've always imagined the game featuring a few ACNH tracks, namely 12PM, 5PM and the island broadcast theme. Indeed, the current version of the demo uses some 8-bit remixes of ACNH songs as placeholders.

Concept Art

Concept art showing designs sketches of a blue rabbit and Kyle, plus an expression portrait of Tom Nook

I worked on the game's designs a bit more and started sketching out portraits for Nook. It's fun to translate these characters from the very simplistic shapes of Animal Crossing into my own art style, with its fluff and big shapes and stuff.

Kyle in particular's being a problem (very canon of him HA). I wanted to make him more african-wild-dog-ish, but it kind of stopped looking like him, and it's hard to find a good color balance with a limited palette. I'll probably go back and tweak his design more.

The designs of the main 3 - the player, Audie and Kyle - are pretty much done. I still need to do the supporting characters.

Code

Using the pronoun picker to input custom pronouns, like a liberal

Ok so. What was I thinking. I'm sure what I meant at the time was, "most of the codebase for the VN talking gameplay parts is done." Since last time, I spent a lot of time building up the scaffolding around the main gameplay - things like a barebones character creator, the settings menu and scene switching, all of which the main game's propped up on top of.

Some scripting for a scene, before and after internal changes

I've also been working on the main VN engine to reduce repetition when writing scenes (note: it's kinda hard to strike a balance between "concise" and "obtuse"). I think I just hate repeating myself, that puts the onus on ME to type everything right 200 times in a row.

I want to have an alpha ready soon which is weird cause I don't really feel like the game's, like, GOOD yet. I guess I just want to know I can make something in a playable state. I looked it up and "alpha" is when you can play a game start to finish, but there's lots of placeholders, and we're not even at that point yet. So it's a pre-alpha.

What's Next?

In the current state, the character creator's basically done. I can release a shitty pre-alpha with that, a really barebones pause menu and a sketch of a playable scene. Actually I don't even really need the menus, I can probably just put debug keys everywhere while I'm building up the UI? w/e

At any rate, I'm focusing on getting the bare minimum done to release a demo with at least the intro and the first scene with Nook. Let's see what I need to do:

• Sketch the expressions Nook uses while talking

• Sketch the backgrounds used for the intro and for the Resident Services building

• Finish writing the intro scene

• Finish writing Nook's scene

• Link the main menu, character creator, settings menu, intro and Nook scene together.

• Add a "that's it for now" screen.

Alright that's it for now, smooch