Dev Diary, January 27th, 2023 (Patreon)

I had this animation I posed a while back that I wasn't sure I was going to use as an intro, as it is a huge one with no lewds. But I decided to go ahead with it in the end, and that thing took 5 days to render, which is most of what my rendering rig has been doing this week. A full 2,200 frames of animation were added.

That gave me a bit of time to look into Renpy, and work on some game functionality, rather than visuals.

If you remember in Leap of Faith, you could give yourself points in Athletic, Flirty, or Romantic. While the system works and is used in several games, overall it's a bit hit-and-miss.

For u4ia I wanted to give you the freedom to choose perks that will customize your gameplay. These talent points (or perks) will allow you to tone down things you aren't interested in, or bring more focus to the things you are interested in.

This way, if you play the game several times for different outcomes, the actual game will feel more different. And even if you only play it once, you can still shape the Main Character or game to your liking. It also gives me the freedom to design different variations of the scenes.

u4ia is still very much a story-based game, but I want to include elements that make it more of a game rather than a kinetic story.

If you want a little preview of the talents in action, check out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iDdOLF_mTY 

There are still some bugs to squish, so ignore those. :p

This thing also took way longer than it would have if I'd just done it the same way as in LoF, but I'm trying to do things more correctly and efficiently, which means learning new things in the process. Short term, it slows things down, but in the long run I will be able to add elements that are more advanced than what they were in LoF.

Anyway, the weekend is right around the corner, so I hope you all enjoy it very much.

Stay safe out there.

// Drifty