Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

It's been a week of sprite and environment work, as expected. ANBC News is now properly set up to support any scene in the story that takes place in that building. In particular, I've added the station's green room (which isn't green), a room we'll see from time to time as the story progresses. In this room, people rest, prepare, and apply makeup before going on set. The first time you'll see it will be in Anna's opening chapter due to her being scheduled to appear on Crosshairs, a hard-hitting show that dives deep into various important topics, with this particular episode meant to focus on the decline in support for superhero ventures. Naturally, Anna is a central figure in such discussions and intends to make the most of it by appearing on television. But, as you will see in this chapter, things are rarely that simple.

Right now, I'm wrapping up the final environment due to appear in this chapter, which I've been planning for a long while. It's an outdoor environment with plenty of detail, but that's not the worst of it. It contains multiple high-quality vehicle models, special effects tied to... certain plot developments, and a small crowd of background characters alongside several named characters. Getting this to render without exceeding the limits of my video memory is critical, and it's something I've been planning for a while. So far, things are going smoothly. It's a pivotal moment in the early story, so I want it to look right.

While I haven't gotten around to it yet (but it should be quick and easy), I will also render a few character portraits for phone calls. The idea is to have the portraits of anyone involved in the phone call appear in the upper right corner of the screen. If you've played the recent Anonymous;Code, you'll have a decent idea of what I have in mind. 

With these things out of the way, the next step is to assemble Anna's chapter in its entirety. This means putting together environments, sprites, portraits, the story, code, music, sound effects, and environmental effects and making this into a vertical slice of the full game to make sure everything looks, sounds, and acts the way I want it to. This will be an essential step and should serve as serious motivation in an otherwise dreary part of game development where it sometimes feels like I'm stuck running in place. 

And that's the current status. No preview images this time since they would either be uninteresting or too revealing. I can't wait to start putting all of this together, so I aim to do that before next week.

Until next time!