November Update Chapter Two (Patreon)

Howdy all, coming in with the November progress update for you. The bad news first, I can't yet give a firm time window on the Patreon release of Chapter 2.  My hope is late December early Jan for Patreon release, and once I have a solid idea of the time frame, y'all will be the first to know.

But now the good news HAPS is full steam ahead on the assets for chapter 2, which right now will include 2 new characters Devon, and the elk from 1.5. The elk character design is artistic liberty for HAPS, so I'm excited to see that. As well as adding more expressions for Aldric and Vincent, and potentially an additional pose for Vincent.

Additionally there will be one new CG featuring an expression change in it. I'm hoping to have a stylized CG from Bork for the mentioned photo of Garth, Tobin, Liam, and Cody in the kitchen making biscuits. 

Speaking of Bork, we already have two finished illustrated backgrounds, and two more planned for Chapter 2.

Drewzy's next task is working on the character design of Misty, the fourth of what will be our main friend group going forward with the story. A dream goal for one of her future story moments would involve me finding an appropriate female vocalist, that is probably a long ways down the road. But just a little insight to how deeply I want to bring this world to life.

Gojii is already well underway creating backfill sound design for Chapter 1, if you haven't seen the tweet check this out https://twitter.com/GOJIIMUSIC/status/1724136905804050520  I'm really excited to give Chapter 1 a playthrough again once the backfill is in.

Onto music, HYENABLOOD currently is working on one new track, with a couple more planned soon. I'll be posting a WIP track for the Mountaineers today. It is a long ambient track that will work as one full song, but also can be split into three chunks to mix up the presence a little and each track will still work on its own. 

Hyena and I will be discussing the UI shortly, to finish off the preferences menu, dialogue boxes, buttons, a journal button as well as something to notify the reader of a new journal entry.

Onto the writing, my editor has given his input on the rough of Chapter 2, so now I'm going through those, and fleshing out the rough into it's final form before grammar and spelling checks. Once I pass it off to him for those, I'll start working on the new journal entries. 

Programming, Jason is making amazing strides with scene lighting that in theory will allow us to control the lighting on the sprites, immersing them more in the scene. So if you're in a dimly lit room for example, we can have them a little darker, rather than full brightness.

Wattson is working on rendering systems that will allow us to add some unique scene animations.

By the end of the month I should be putting the script into the code, planning out sprite placements, expressions, etc.

So things are going well, I'm closing in on the goal of having everything ready to go, so as soon as I get the sprites, I'll take two days putting them in, testing it, and putting it up for y'all.