Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

With the announcement of my upcoming game, Supermodel: Defenders of Desire, the weekly progress reports will look a little different in the immediate future. From now on, I will split the progress report into two sections, one for each game. Since I don't always work on both of those games in the same week, either one of those sections might be pretty sparse. However, this way of dividing things up should make it easier for you to see the progress of each individual game. Furthermore, it will help remind me to split my efforts.

Long Live the Princess

I didn't do much work on LLtP this week, seeing as this was the announcement week for Supermodel. I did set up some 4K renders of a certain one-time character for Grandmaster backers, so you can expect to see that dropped relatively soon.

Supermodel: Defenders of Desire

This game had most of my attention this week, which was only natural. A lot of my focus was on the announcement itself and the materials I needed to post. Still, I have also done a bit of coding, modeling, and a bit of writing.

On the coding front, I'm still trying to wrap up the card game prototype before I allow myself to dive too deep into the rest of the experience. After all, the card game is the most significant risk in this project. The entire experience will live or die based on how well the card game works, so if I mess this up, the whole house of cards (har har) will come tumbling down. We can't have that. As such, I tweaked the state manager (an engine that keeps track of what is happening in the game right now so that I can easily keep track of what is allowed and what isn't) and introduced an end turn/phase button. I'm getting very close to this game being playable (but extremely basic).

For modeling, I started setting up the animation and scene for the main menu. LLtP was kind of a slow burn in impressing people, but I want Supermodel to blow people away before they've even clicked "new game." That's why I want to make sure that the animation on this screen looks great. So far, my test renders are promising. I expect to have to render more than 1000 images for this animation alone, but this will be a good trial run of how Supermodel development will function in the future. 

Finally, I started actually writing some of the early text for Anna Morgenstern's first chapter. This is where first impressions come into the picture once again. The writing needs to hook the player immediately, and I've been going over these scenes in my head for a long time, trying to work out how best to present them. I think I'm pretty much where I want them to be now, so now I just have to write it all down.

And that's it for this week's progress report. Remember, I post frequent live updates on the Discord server, so that's the place to be if you want the juiciest of development details.

Until next time!