Friday Update! (Patreon)

Hello friends! I know I usually update on Saturdays but I have a weird social-distancing camping thing planned with friends so it'll have to be today! 

I do come bearing some very good news though! 

I've settled into the process of drawing expressions while editing and I feel like I'm getting some really good work done! Being able to see my writing with the appropriate sprites and expressions really changes the whole thing for me. I'm more excited and inspired about my work and it's coming through with both my sprite work and the dialogue/text edits I've been making.

I promised last week that I could be able to come up with a better timeline for this chunk of work and I have. I'm finding that I seem to be able to reliably edit and draw for two endings per day. Therefore, I should hopefully be able to get this chunk done in about 25 work days- which should be just a bit over a month of real-time.

I've begun my work in Derek's path since I'm pumped and I want to clear the biggest hurdle first.

I started slow on Monday by mostly just fixing existing sprite base errors. All the side sprites had to be re-exported because I saved them in a really dumb way that was hard to make reliable edits to. I fixed errors in fullbody sprites to make them sharper and cleaner. And lastly, I did a couple teeny fixes like a missing wedding ring on Harold and making Celia's hair colour nicer.

After that, I dove right in with the expressions. I've made large editing changes to the intro scene text [ it's much smoother now I think ] and started passing out expressions where I need them. Derek's been getting the most since he's on screen a lot and he's not wearing a mask.

Derek now has 11 side-sprite expressions and 2 fullbody expressions. Richard got one expression so far and Jack got two. [ I can't doo much with the mask but I can use the eyes to emote a bit! ]

But who wants to read walls of text about what I was doing? Screencaps are more fun- so here's a couple!

Honestly having a blast right now. I think this is my favourite stage of work in making a game like this :D

When I worked on BTD stuff, this is the stage I basically started with. I just wrote the text and did the sprites all in one pass. While it was obviously way faster, I'm eager to see if people will feel a difference in quality and polish in something that's actually gone through a couple passes of real editing.

I'm personally finally starting to see this project as something much better than BTD was.

Anyway! This has been an ultra-long update, so I better shut up and get back to work LMAO! Thank you so much for your support- to my old supporters and the new ones who have only recently come aboard! Even more than usual, it is an absolute pleasure to work for you. <3