Friday Update #6 (It's Britney, Bitch) (Patreon)
Content
As those of you in our Discord server probably already know, Britney's placeholder sprites are fucking gone. They've been 100% removed from the game files in the current WIP dev build and only remain as a ghost of the past on the game's private GitHub.
Taking their place are her final sprites. I already gushed about those in our last Friday Update, so instead of doing the same thing again, I'm going to break things down on a technical side this week.
Britney's sprites were commissioned from Myumi a few months back. Her design document explains the commission details, and I've already covered most of what we're getting in a previous Friday Update.
Unlike Student Transfer's custom sprite method that works in abstracts, Britney is displayed with Ren'Py's native layeredimage method. It's the same way that Ai, Keisuke, the shower HCGs, and Zoey's placeholder sprites have worked since 0.5.1. That release's changelog largely covers the benefits of the layeredimage method, but one of the more important things is that all the parts are easily interchangeable for customization.
Britney Nueva has 14 preassembled expressions (which are largely identical across her 3 poses), but having access to her raw layers means that it's trivially easy to create custom expressions for her from those parts.
Myumi still has to make a few fixes (3 of these expressions have mouths that aren't fully defined), and only Nu Britney's first pose has been completed, but what we have is enough for the moment to get her working.
These aren't mock game windows for testing; Britney Novus is fully functional in the game.
As per the last update's changelog:
Zoey's placeholder sprites have been rescaled to the projected size of TiltSHIFT's Zoey sprites. Yes, she's really that short (160cm/5'3") compared to Keisuke (182cm/6'0"). But highlighting the height difference between her and Keisuke isn't the reason for this adjustment; no, she has been resized in order to pair better with the size of Myumi's Britney sprites. After some prodding, he has projected a date between December 4th and December 6th to complete the first pose of Britney's sprites to the point that they can be used in-game (that means giving her a full set of expressions, her facial emotes, the casual and nude outfits, both her hairstyles, and her glasses). I know all you yuri fans out there have been lamenting Britney's neglect for over 10 months, but she's finally going to get new story content next update!
I still need to make a full pass for edits to the neglected Britney script file, but expect her first update in over 10 months next week!