Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

This has been an incredibly productive week. I can now proudly say that the gameplay portion of the Supermodel Snapshot prototype is complete and polished. Let's go over the most important things I did since the last progress report:

The game over screens are complete. Whenever you lose or win the game, a window pops up and tells you whether you succeeded or failed and how well you did. Once you close this window, you are returned to the main menu so that you can start a new game. Importantly, if you fail, this window will tell you why.

I finished composing Ida Yasuda's (Vanguard's) theme, which is used during gameplay in the prototype. I'm pulling off a few neat tricks to make the music feel slightly more dynamic than you might expect during gameplay. When you start the match, the music will stay in a holding pattern until you finish the mulligan phase (more on that below). At that point, it will smoothly and, without any abrupt transitions, move into the main melodic loop. I was a little surprised that Ren'py supported something like this, but I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. The result of all this is that each gameplay theme in the game will require 5 different files; 4 of these will be for the gameplay itself, while the last one is meant for the gallery (which won't be available in the first prototype). I'm delighted with how Vanguard's theme turned out, and I'm giddy with excitement at the thought of letting you all hear it soon.

And that brings us to the mulligan phase mentioned above. Mulligan was the final puzzle piece I needed for the prototype gameplay to work as intended. When you start a new match, you draw a hand of 5 cards, the AI plays a single Challenge card, and then you enter the mulligan phase. This only occurs at the start of the match and gives you a one-time opportunity to discard any cards you don't want in your opening hand. Once done, new cards are drawn from your deck to replace the ones you discarded, and the discarded cards are added back into the deck to be drawn again later. This feature gives you much more control over your opening hand and helps mitigate poor luck in the first turn. Early testing shows that this makes the game noticeably easier, but that's okay. The difficulty will get tweaked based on feedback anyway.

Last but certainly not least, I created a really cool background animation for the main menu. This one is way more impressive than what you saw in Long Live the Princess, and it's something I've been planning for a long time. I want people to be blown away the instant they see this menu since it's their first impression of the game, so I'm pulling out all the stops. 

Before releasing the first version of Supermodel Snapshot, I still need to adjust the menu interface, add music to the main menu, and create a tutorial. Of these three, the music adds the most significant unpredictability since I can't force my music production ability yet. Even so, I'm very optimistic about my progress right now. While some things are coming up this month that will limit my available time, my current goal is to get the prototype out in February. I can't guarantee I will make it, but I'm giving it my best shot.

Until next time!