Development Update #1 (August) (Patreon)

[Images in the gallery will be better to view vs viewing them within the post.]

It's time for some updates! This one will focus on our completion of the new art style sprites into the game! This also includes existing cg art being updated, but there's still going to be some cg in the old art style in-game that'll be slowly replaced in time. ^^"

Before we begin, if you didn't see our development update at the end of July, we listed our development progress and timeline of what remains before we have v0.20 ready. I'll list the updated version below!

-Final editing pass. 25-30% --> 40-45% done.
-Engine transfer. 30% --> 40% done.
-New assets added/functioning correctly. 50% --> 90-95% done.
-New feature/systems testing. 25% done.
-General testing pass.
-Release.

The biggest area of progress has been with the new art style assets and making sure they're in-game functioning the way they should without bugs, game breaking issues, etc. Luckily that's been pretty smooth sailing! We are missing the new style for Nathan and Karissa for episodes 1-4 and in general. John's sprite will be updated later, but we're replacing his scenes with the new Tara character taking his role as the teacher. 

(If you're a bit behind on who Tara is, we did a preview for her last week.)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/sprite-preview-87192415 

For v0.20 what we'll have in our release notes is "John's sprite isn't updated, not a bug. Being replaced with Tara in v0.21 onward." Juuust so I don't receive a few comments about that after release. :P

Anyways! With Nathan and Karissa being the last two needed for episodes 1-4 to look good and of course they're needed for episode 5 in general. It won't take more than a day or two to get their new style assets in when they're ready and test their scenes to make sure nothing is out of place.

Enough of my rambling though, I have screenshots of how the game looks before and after. Ignore the awkward dialogue text box, the text has been fixed, but I didn't have it shown here in these screenshots. ^^"

Mainly I wanted to take a screenshot from each existing episode to showcase how the characters look currently in-game vs how they'll look in v0.20 onward. I know with the art previews showing the new style and showing their old style next to the new style in those posts are probably good enough for some people to gauge how things will look.. I wanted to provide actual screenshots of in-game scenes to give exactly how the game looks moving forward.

One thing to note.. Some expressions for the new sprites have been updated to reflect expressions better, so you might notice some very different tones from a character or two in these screenshots. ^^" Those will be adjusted in v0.21 onward!

Point taken, Nova here has the expression "fear" used, but her current one is very clearly different than her new version of "fear". Pretty much, during v0.21 forward, we'll lightly put some time aside to do some quality fixes for older content, but our main priority will still be on providing brand new content vs quality of life, small stuff that some might like, but who can beat new content vs a touch-up of old content? :P

Pretty much, during some scenes if you play through existing episodes 1-4 upon v0.20's release.. Just expect the tone of some scenes to feel a bit "off" in how it's presented. We'll make note of that in the release notes as well!

Almost hard to notice Erika's change here! XD Heather on the other hand.. Menacing! Wonder if Heather should actually come across that way during this introduction for her or if it'll be too out of plac- ...Who am I kidding? It's Heather! Of course this suits her! :S

Here's a light example, where Bridget and Miki's expressions carried over well to their new style for the scene moment. Erika on the other hand, her "thinking" expression when looking at the two in comparison is a bit funny! Of course, long as the screenshot with the new style fits the tone and context for what's going on, that's going to be our goal with v0.21 forward on touching up some stuff lightly.

With that, it ends our dev update for previews! I mainly wanted to focus on dedicating this update to show off the new style in-game and really give everyone a sense of how that actually looks, what to expect when playing v0.20 forward.

That said.. Next week's dev update won't be visually entertaining, but it will feature some episode 5 scripts and our first look into Lola's new introduction! ^^