Dev Diary #2

Hi everyone! As promised last month, here's a new dev diary update, explaining what we've been up to over the month of October! Overall, things are moving along slowly but steadily, and we're still on track to fulfill the 2021 roadmap we posted at the start of the year, which is great news!

Story

We are currently in the stage of development where the pipeline we have planned out for the last year is finally up and running. Our pipeline is as follows:

We have three writers, namely Gherod, Vinickus and Lone Wanderer. The latter focuses more on the lore and design aspects of the game, as well as editing and suggesting changes to writing. When possible, he also writes; the other two are currently the writers who produce more writing content, passing it on.

When a piece of writing is finished by Gherod and Vinckus, it goes into the editing and then review process. After that is finished, the content is ready to be implemented by our programmers and later on Samples can go through the content to add existing or new tracks to go along with whatever is happening on-screen.

Currently, day 7, Brym's new first date and Lucra's first date have been finished in writing and await implementation. Day 8 and Brym's second date are currently in the works, and if possible Cedrik's first date might also see its completion relatively soon.

Cedrik's date has taken us a while longer because a re-design of his personality came along with it, where he actually has to display what kind of person he is, other than just screwing everything up at every opportunity. Cedrik will also get a much bigger focus in the oncoming arc, so you will get to see a bit more of him during day 8.

The next build, while still having a lot of re-used content (Brym's former third date), will see Morias get a bit more of a spotlight and prepare the story for what is to come.

Artwork

With the last dev diary, we shared that Folsky's current focus was to create a full set of side portraits for Yarin. We decided to start this process with him because he will be the primary character to be featured in side portraits, so having his set made first would help cover most of the game's dialogue with side portraits already.

He has since been making new versions of the original set of 7, tweaking Yarin's body build in the process to make him look more like the twink he is. The new versions are also viewed from slightly further away, since more of his shirt is visible and the heads are slightly smaller, making it easier to tell his body build and proportions.

The old set of side sprites

Revised side sprites (flats) and more

We also realize we never really addressed how we go about setting up the different visual elements. Some may wonder why we are both using fully expressive sprites, as well as side portraits. Isn't that overkill? The answer is we are combining these visuals in a way that should contribute to a comprehensive experience once the game is finalized.

Our plan is to use full body sprites with various poses and expressions for every character in the game. We will be making as many as we deem useful to cover most interactions between them and Yarin, and we aren't necessarily sticking to strict expression guidelines (i.e. a fixed number of set expressions). This allows us to portray the full range of expressions individually per character, making their personalities shine in the process.

The full sprites will be used only by other characters, and only appear on screen when Yarin can see them in front of him. Side portraits will be used by Yarin primarily to show off his range of emotions when engaging in dialogue, but they will also be used by other characters when Yarin can't see them directly (i.e. when talking on the phone with him). Of course, these are moreso general guidelines, we may choose to use these elements in different ways during specific scenes, for instance if we want the visual focus to differ from strictly what Yarin sees.

Anyway, moving on to Rauch's contributions, he completed a reworked reference sheet for a character previously shown in the game, which will be changing his appearance soon. His name is Bio, the repair man. Given that we removed Draxima from the game, somebody still has to take his place as the main repair person, so he's stepping up to the task (this time in a new body):

You will notice he is no longer a turtle, but rather a hybrid between a lizard and pangolin (we promise it was a coincidence, but counting Corvolin we will now have two pangolin hybrids in the game). We also slightly adjusted his attire to account for the species change.

Rauch also started working on some new backgrounds for the content we've been writing recently. This shot represents a view of Yarin's suite as seen from the bathroom entrance. The floor is covered in dirt, so that should be a sign of the events to come.

He even made another variation of the VIP elevator interior with only the emergency lights turned on. It should make for a nice suspenseful scene.

Audio

On the audio side, Samples has finished adding music and sounds to the Garreth dating content this month, excluding SFX for sex scenes (we're talking about the mayo jar stuff, of course). Though we're still unsure whether we'd want to add those kinds of sounds to the game anyway. No completely new tracks were made, but we already have quite a library of melodies anyway, so that shouldn't be cause for concern. These changes will still need to be merged, but hopefully that will be done with the next version.

We're also looking into finally adding UI sounds. Samples made some SFX for that very early on when he joined, but we never got to implement them. These may not arrive with the next version though.

Programming

Until the end of the year, Wattson hopes to improve the stability of the audio framework he wrote and implemented some versions ago. While it has been working generally well and it did improve lots of processes on the backend, it's still not perfect and there have been bugs discovered both internally and by players which we will want to address.

Others

Rriik has been slowly transitioning away from actively working on the framework and onto preparing QA tests, breaking down all the content into small fragments that could be worked through more easily. These fragments will be verified for missing art assets and audio, as well as writing and typos, and the missing pieces of the puzzle will be added to our to-do lists. Overall, this effort should pay off once all the assets are created and assembled into the game.

This has been about it for this month, but join us on next month's dev diary post too for more updates!