Dev Update - February 20th, 2019 (Patreon)

Heyo everyone! Vilsa here with your weekly burst of eye candy! Let's just enthusiastically leap into it!

Overhauled Character Rendering

This will probably be a hard to notice improvement unless it's pointed out, but we've done a large amount of work on how CharacterSprites are rendered. CharacterSprites are basically the high detail representations of a character that get displayed in places like the dialogue and the inventory menu.

You've probably noticed that you can see through the clothes of a character whenever they fade out. This is because every piece of clothing is just another image drawn on top of the character in layers.

Now we've found an awesome way to flatten all these layers into one image to be drawn so you no longer see through clothes (and hair) when a character fades out. This also makes things a little faster since it doesn't have to draw multiple images, and we save memory for all these images.  

Just an overall awesome performance gain with a slight visual improvement as well. It may seem like a simple fix, but this was a large amount of research and overhaul work to accomplish. We're super proud of this awesome fix to a problem that has plagued CharacterSprites since they were created.

New Environment

Here's another extended look at the new environment that you'll be exploring in 0.9.0 during the main story content that we're going to be adding. We're really happy with the work that Scapefiend has done with the environment art, and the work that bearcore has put in with laying out the level and placing props.

Bartending

Here's another little look at how bartending will work in 0.9.0. This will be side content that's going to be added along with the main story content. This additional content is thanks to starryGrail's writing work and bearcore's implementation work.

Obligatory Pun

Here's a quick peek at the script of the main story content.

I've been writing a lot of sex scenes and will be working on implementing my writing into the new environment once I've got a good amount written. No new CGs will be added for these h-scenes, as GearZs is going to be focused on concept art and overworld sprites to help bring the new characters to life. However, we will be reusing appropriate CGs that are already complete so that there is still a visual component to the new h-scenes.