Weekly Update/Preview Sept 11-18 (Patreon)

How to summarize this week? Fairly busy, both in the sense of the game and not. More external obligations, though those should have calmed down again comparatively. I'd like to hunker down and get some good work done now, and I should have the schedule to do so now. I'll keep it there rather than complaining about the specifics of things from the past week...

Well, except jury duty. I'll still complain about that being annoying even if I recognize it as a necessary part of the judicial system.

But yeah that's not what you're here for, so let's talk about preview stuff again.

Another UI Thing

This is another similar continuation in the list of various UI improvements. Like I talked about last week, the idea is to improve the smoothness of how information is shown, even if it doesn't actually give any new information that you couldn't have gotten before. I haven't done a "normal" playtest with this change yet, but even in the initial feature testing it surprised me how much information I suddenly felt I was missing after turning it off.

I think that may be why I was initially surprised when this one actually generated a little discussion/pushback when first tweeted. I believe the problems are visual noise as well as the images not staying for all that long, making it somewhat difficult to glean the exact nature of the threat being shown. That's fine though. From that I've further adjusted the timing of various parts (scaling speed, fade in/out speed) to try and make it a bit more visible. Even if it isn't perfect, I'm sure that over time players will pick up on what threats give them the danger time neuron activation, which is probably more important than being able to instantly recognize every threat. Speaking of dangers though...

Needing to update her

The original drider picture is quite old. I think it still looks okay-ish, but the colors feel a bit washed out, making the whole thing lack definition. As I have talked about before, there are limits on my actual artistic ability. The art style and filters and whatnot cover some of that up, which is intentional, but I still can hardly call any of my created assets perfect or even all that close to it. Still, at least with the drider in particular, I always knew that I could and should do better, but was putting it off since I also intended to build some more content for her eventually.

And now we're there, more or less. Working up toward the actual intended central bit of gameplay to be added in this update turns out to be a good place to fix up and add some more drider stuff. Part of doing that means creating more CGs, and doing THAT should be a lot easier now, as I can use an updated/consistent model.

As for how MUCH new content... I'm not 100% certain on the amount  yet, but at the very least I intend to finally make RE_Drider1_Cum.json  actually do something, rather than just sitting in the drider's event  folder not hooked up for like... 8 months or something.

We splashin

Y'know, I've been very intentionally vague about the exact state of the season/weather that the game is taking place during, but regardless I imagine that any river the knights are using for bathing is pretty cold. Bearable, almost certainly, but hard to imagine as being all that pleasant. Something something Syra blessings, I dunno.

Rambling aside, part of the reason for putting this one up here is to try and force myself to commit to adding at least one (if not more) Raine camp scene. Between the three main knights, I feel like she's been getting the least screen time? It's hard to tell if that's actually the case or not, but just the fact that I'm considering it a possibility means I should probably act on it. I do have my own ranking as far as best girl goes, but I'd like to act in such a way that it's not immediately apparent what that ranking actually is if you just look at the game.

So as a result we have Raine flopping into the water. The specifics of how this comes about and whatnot will not be explained here, but I do have what sounds like a fun idea to me for this particular event. Look forward to it, along with all the other stuff still coming up!