Sprite Gallery - 3/23/24 (Patreon)

Ew, it's been a whole month since the last status update. Sorry, I must've forgot to make more status updates than this. I've been getting some serious progress done, though!

Since Alan's relaunched route is nearly ready for testing, here's what you can expect to see.

Wow he's large. Unfortunately, I have a headache and don't feel like resizing the image! Ah well.

Barry here got an update and is now no longer an ambiguous purple creature. Now, he is a far less ambiguous purple badger! A dadger, as they say.

Next, I've finished the writing on Alan's route! I still have yet to get it tested, but it falls in line now with my new plan for the route. Like the other routes, there weren't very many large changes. A couple new scenes, a few rewritten scenes, sure, but the brunt of it is in fixing the spritework and touching up some dialogue- something that I may need to go back and make sure is finished.

(I usually make those kinds of revisions in the last stage, when I'm watching my friend play through the game).

There's been some cute new additions and tweaks to Alan's dialogue, so (personally) I find the route quite a bit more endearing than it was before! I'm looking forward to showing you all what Alan's route will have to offer.

Lastly, and very importantly, we've got...!

That's right! The sprite gallery has received some much-needed tweaks, giving you access to some new information about the characters, statistics, and their full arsenals of outfits and expression pieces to mix and match at your leisure. I'm about halfway done with the character pages so far, but if I buckle down I could definitely get the last half done tomorrow.

Using Eiji here as an example, normally these characters' sprites are more or less positioned relative to each other height-wise. There are some outliers like Barry...

Who would normally be standing at a much higher position compared to these two. He's a big man!

These are more or less necessary sacrifices, but it does mean that sometimes, certain characters don't have something positioned where you'd like to see it.

Realistically I could be talking about anything, here.

In all seriousness, I've had a system working for a fair bit here where I set the background to black and pan the sprite up- something I can only do thanks to Wattson's excellent work re-tooling the way sprites are shown in the game. It serves as a nice way to let you see things below where the screen would cut off- for examples, Jehu's marking or Barry's prosthetic.

With the sprite gallery (which will still be an Employee tier perk), now you'll be able to view these sprites in all their glory.

Pretty nifty, right?

And of course, like the sprites before, the code for this was made by Wattson. It's not a walk in the park at the moment (it's slow and repetitive work to punch everything in properly), but he really helped me out here.

Look forward to seeing the Alan route relaunch drop soon!

As a fun little aside, when I was unwinding from Sihai work I decided to do a little brainstorming about a(nother) potential future project I could do after Sihai is completed. It's a long way off, I know, but honestly it's just fun to think about.

Don't ask me why I did the weird censoring, I'm not entirely sure. Just felt right, I guess.

The general idea of the story is that you are playing from the PoV of a grumpy, loner, kinda rude cat professor who just wants to go home and take a nap by himself. Shenanigans will ensue, dates will be made with other teachers on the staff (the other three), and relationships will be formed.

It's honestly interesting to think about, since the method of storytelling I'd like to tackle for it (at least at this point in time) is that you are The main character, and the story is very much Your story. The other teachers will have relevance and their own arcs and content, but they'll be very much playing the roles of supporting characters to Mr. Noel's story. I kinda think of it like the other teachers are side quests in Mr. Noel's main story quests.

Mr. Noel is the cat there, by the way, next to the horse.

(...Technically Sihai's Legacy's story is MC's story, but he shares a lot of the spotlight not just on a route-to-route basis, but also in the grand, overarching story. It's kinda like MC's spread a biit thin... but I could go into that in a whole dedicated post to the MC's development as a character.)

ANYWAY. It's fun to think about! I have a lot of options for things I could toy with post-Sihai, and none of which do I need to focus on right now at all. I've been thinking that, maybe, when the time comes, I could invoke some poll shenanigans to see what stories people are interested in. As for now, though, I just wanted to share the cute men I designed.

(Eagle-eyed viewers might regonize one of the characters there...)

Anyhow! See you all when the Alan relaunch drops o7 Won't be long, now!