Ghost chibi reveal + Devlog #090 + Monstergirl poll #29 is on! (Patreon)

Ghost chibi!
What do you think? I'm especially happy with the result this time! This is probably the sexiest chibi yet, which would make sense for a character who got the "Lusty" modifier ^^
She was a lot of fun to draw and think up poses for, and the lack of legs and hands made it easier as well. She's also the first floating character I've ever drawn chibi sprites for! Floating characters have slightly different animation in the overworld. These are all already implemented from years ago, I just never had a reason to use them until now. Ghost won't be the only floating character of course, there will be others like Fairy, Succubus, Gravitar or Saen'Liz.
Either way, I hope you'll like her!

As for this month's progress, I made a LOT of it!
The first thing I decided to tackle was the full character sprite update. I mentioned this a while back, but in the current demo, each character has their sprites cut into several parts: The body parts that change when ranking up (usually the boobs, but sometimes more), the rest of the body (which then has a big square cut out of it), the face, and an optional top sprite for special cases. I figured cutting out the rank affected part was more work than it was worth, and so I set out to fix that. As I looked into that code, I realized it was very, very old, and honestly pretty bad. I also knew I wanted to add a few things to make these full sprites look a bit more dynamic in game. So I took care of all of that code, but then I had to update the sprites themselves to test it! I figured it would be a good time to import all the new characters as well while I was at it. As always importing sprites is a bit of a pain, and there was also the added step of calibrating the face to make sure it appears in the right coordinates. After a bit of struggling, all of the character sprites were ready, and I was able to test the in game portraits. Once I was happy with it, I still had apply these changes wherever it was needed, which was for the most part during fights.
I improved some of the fights' code a while back (the way the puzzle grid works, specifically), but I noticed how messy a lot of it still was due to its age (like the full sprite's code, this is one of the very first things I made for BEW), and I had trouble finding what I was looking for. After looking into it some more, I decided now was the best time to take care of it. While it did work currently, building on top of it would have eventually caused me a lot of trouble. And so! It took me some time, but I'm very, very pleased with the results:

- First of all, everything is cleaner and more optimized. I'll be able to find what I'm looking for and add new things more easily now, be it new spells, blocks, or shapes.

- The characters look much more alive, with a bunch of movements depending on their actions (I'm mostly talking about sprite deformation here, like you'd see on the chibis. The sprites aren't actually animated!).

- The enemy Monstergirl will now blink in purle when she's close to casting a spell, making it way easier to keep track of.

- The background has been updated! It looks very pleasing, and is way darker. The bright pink was nice and all, but it made an information heavy game even harder to read.

- The health gauges now blink in red when the HP reaches under 1/3 of the max HP.

- Shapes now have a black outline, but the original hitbox has been conserved. They look nicer that way, and are easier to see!

- The heart now has an additional 2 levels of HP. In the current demo, it only went from red to blue to green to yellow, but it now also goes to purle, and finally cyan! I figured it made more sense. Each rank up increases that limit by 1.

- The "fight end" animation has been improved.

- The result screen has been improved.

- The KO system has been improved. This might not mean a lot since it wasn't even in the current demo, but long story short I tried some stuff a while back instead of the "try again", "run away" and "give up" choices you get when you lose a fight, but it turned out to be pointlessly over complicated, so I changed it to be very simple: If a character loses a fight, they will be KOed. You can't play as them anymore until you reach a save room or revive them with an item. If everyone in the party is KOed, you'll get a Game Over and be sent back to the last save room you reached, and lose half of your money and shards.

- A lot of Game over related stuff has been improved.

- And finally, I added a feature that lets you switch character mid fight! I'm very pleased with it. There is pretty much no point in changing character in the current demo, and I'm pretty sure many never even bothered to use Rose. In an effort to change that, I added unique skills, party skills and heart weapons a while back, but I still wasn't satisfied. However, now that you can change characters mid fight, you'll get a lot of options in how to approach different situations since you'll get access to more spells, different stats and different heart weapons per character. You also get a small heal each time you switch! However, you can only do it as many times as you have characters in your party (4 at most), and any character who participates in a fight won't be able to use the "my turn" feature I added a while back (which basically allows you to redo a fight with another character to get more loot). But yeah, party composition now has actual weight!

And that's about it when it comes to normal fights. I consider that fight update final by the way, there are no plans to add anything else there. There's more though!

- The KO system has been applied to the shape fights as well, and some of the animations have been improved.

- the ranking system I added a while back has been improved a bit too (not that this would mean a whole lot to you since it's a new thing anyway, but still!)

- A bit more of an accessibility thing, but I added a setting to invert left and right click.

- The inventory BG and Overworld UI BG have been improved.

- Items can now be used by dropping them from your inventory and dragging them onto a character.

- Small improvement to the enemy defeated animation in the overworld.

- And finally, a bunch of other smaller fixes have been taken care of.

Oh and also, I've added the password system! I'm going to keep what it is exactly a secret, but I wanted to mention it.

Alright, and that's it for now. There are still a few things I need to take care of before the cutscenes, but I'm almost there! I guess I might as well explain what's left to do exactly:

- Improve the amplification animation: The current one is very underwhelming. I'm already halfway done on the new one!

- check alchemy mode and training mode: With the changes I've made to the fights, a few things undoubtedly broke there since some of the code is shared there, so I need to fix that. I don't have plans to add new features here so it won't take long.

- Add an almanach page shortcut: A quick way to access a specific page of your choosing instead of having to open the almanach and look for it. It's not only useful, but necessary for the beginning of the game where you won't have the almanach yet since I still want the player to have access to the color mixing guide, so I'lluse this instead.

- One last, very important menu.

After that, it will be time for the dialogue update which will tie directly into the cutscenes. The game will feel very different once it's done, so it's both very exciting and very intimidating... I have no doubt I'll be able to begin, and hopefully get a nice chunk of that task taken care of this month, so I'll report on that in the next devlog! ^^

In any case, that's all I got for now!

The next monstergirl poll has begun! You can now vote for the monstergirl you want to be included in BE Witches in the Discord if you are a 2$+ patron!

The poll will be active until August 12th. After this, you will be able to change your submitted modifier until August15th. Finally, the two rounds of the modifier poll will take one week each.

Monstergirl poll rules

Poll submissions

Also, now is a good time to submit a monstergirl and/or modifiers if you haven't already as a patron! If you can't think of anything to submit, here is a list of ideas you can choose from. You don't have to submit in the Discord server, you can also leave a comment here or e-mail me at Nosebecc@gmail.com