Developer Diary 27 - Buying Menu (again) (Patreon)

This week started with focusing on seeing if I can also apply the coloring technique using code to skin tones. Right now skin tones are slightly ‘hacked in’, since I currently colored sprites which have a fair skin tone, and render the darker tones on top to achieve the tans. Using the code method, I will have a much more precise approach, since the idea is that there will be around 10 levels of tanning, and you will need to go to the salon multiple times to get a stronger tan. I would need to come up with a new method of applying the tan lines, but I think I have some ideas in mind for that.

After that I worked on the sprite of a new store NPC: Boris Wolf. He will be taking care of your hair and your eyebrows in the game. Trust me, you will be in good hands!

Finally I spent a big chunk of time redoing the buying menu (again). I recently played through Pokemon Ultra Moon, and they use quite an interesting system for the hair salon. The NPC talks you through the menus and asks you step by step how you would like your hair. I didn’t like the system in that game because it lacked previews, but it might be something to explore for my game, if the previews are more clear, and paying happens at the very end. Right now the menu works, but it still doesn’t feel good to me. I hope that soon I can have a breakthrough and come up with a good system. It is becoming quite frustrating, since it takes so much time to code something when I come up with a solution (not just coding the new stuff but also taking old code out).

Finally I had some fun and added three more hair colors. While doing this though, I realized I really do want to have a way to have ombre/gradient hair colors. This isn’t so easy to achieve with the method I use now, but I am sure it is possible. It’s not something I can fully focus on now, but I definitely will try to get it into the game at some point.

I am terribly sorry it has taken such a long time for another build to come up. We really are in the shitty part of the development: a lot of coding (which I’m not good at) and a lot of designing menus (hard). I hope to get you something to play soon!

Thank you for reading, and for your support, as always!

~Albatross