Bubblegum Sunday - Devlog 11 (Patreon)

So… what’s up? Yeah, I know. It’s been a lot of silence on this project. Believe it or not, I actually work on it almost every week, but not a lot gets done to put all the pieces together. There’s a lot of problems at play all at once which make this project.. hard.

I do realize it's important to be transparent, so I wanna share some of the progress and stressors I've had!

One of the main hurdles is the actual Unity project file itself. Since Vivi does the programming, we decided early on they would control the actual project file and I would only be delivering files. The issue here being that Vivi has to add everything I create, creating a huge bottleneck. And almost everything I design will still need tweaking or editing in Unity itself, so that info has to be handed along as well. A lot of these things are frustratingly out of my hands. In the past in GameMaker I was the whole pipeline and every step of the way was in my hands. Now I got a bunch of work piled up that I can’t really do because I don’t have access to the project file.

Why do it this way? I don’t know a lot about Unity beyond general knowledge of software and roughly how the engine works. With two people tinkering on one file, the risk of breaking stuff is a lot higher. And it is EASY to break stuff in Unity. Especially since it uses file links, and when dealing with testing assets and deleting files, issues quickly arise. But as a result nothing is really getting done to actually put more of the game together. I’ve got a hundred puzzle pieces but no easy access to the board. We are going to be looking into giving me direct access to the file at this point, because it’s gotten to the point where it’s extremely frustrating for me.

It’s also gotten to the point where art I’ve drawn is at this point years old… making it tempting to actually redraw things. Especially the main character art is a sore point for this as I keep going back to the drawing board (literally) and changing things about the core art. You have to remember your character art has to be consistent throughout all of the outfits I want to have (100+) and the lighting must feel similar, the shading, quality… etc. It’s very hard to not overdo it when it comes to perfecting this asset. I’ve drawn over a dozen outfits and then totally redid the body. All work in the trash basically. I realize it’s more important to get this done than for it to be 1000% perfect, but still. If the foundation isn’t absolutely rock solid… all future art will have issues carried over.

Recently decided her figure looks better with her legs closed, so all previous assets can be canned.

We’ve implemented the main menu with the art and the ID cards. Currently only one save file works, but it’s something. Working on this naturally led Vivi to setting up our audio system. No audio yet, but we do have the engine for it and all the logic needed. It all seems simple and stuff you don’t even consider, but it takes so much time for the smallest thing to happen. It is really frustrating, I hope you understand that. I’ve worked more on items and am desperately searching for some kind of cohesion in the UI. Especially within the thumbnails it can be a pain, since the dress-up thumbnails all have ugly cut-off edges. So far no real luck. I want to have little pop-up cards when you hover over items. Here are a few of them.

The hover cards for items. All equip items still suck cause they are sort of awkwardly cropped thumbnails.

I also grinded the hell out of the main menu art, but it's still only like 70% complete. And there is also the night time version to do still. Eek!

Not the whole art, but most of it.

Next up for me I really need to start implementing things. There’s so much to do. Setting up each location with their corresponding NPC, lighting each location properly, setting up ambient sounds. Giving NPC’s dialogue trees and correctly filling the stores with items. It’s a lot, just to show you a little. 

Colorful phone buttons.


Dixie's Bar.

Glaze is where you get make-up, hair, tanning, etc. 

Another outfit with the new legs.

I wish I had more to show for the time I’ve spent, but most of my time is spent trying to figure stuff out. I hope that there comes a day where I can finally begin making content and show it to you. It’ll all be worth it in the end (I hope!)

Alba