Saturday Update (Patreon)

I'm gonna be real here, I'm in a terrible mental space today. 

My knee-jerk response to perceived rejection is to immediately and violently withdraw from social situations, which is interpreted as rejection, so my emotional hurdle is deep loneliness caused by my own massive hypocrisy and I'm not feeling great :')

But it is Saturday and I have an update to write so I am going to do that!

While I was doing my usual same-old 'play the game and draw expressions as I go' strategy, there were also two major noteworthy work events last week.

I'll start with the sort of 'bad news' one: I realized as I working that Mason's backgrounds are definitely the lowest quality of the bunch [ which makes perfect sense, I did them first ]. While most of my gripes have been little things, I realized that the interior cabin shot has a really bad camera angle for sprites.

This test screenshot of Mason over the background shows the biggest glaring problem: the bed edge in the foreground.

I drew Mason's backgrounds like a comic artist and included foregrounds, when I really should have left that out since sprites will act as the foreground elements.

So far, I've decided to simply not use a full-body sprite against this background [ there's not much sprite dialogue that goes with this background ] for now.

However, if time allows, I think I'd like to set aside a day or two in the future just to go over Mason's backgrounds and tighten them up a bit. Mostly it would just be the time to re-export the 4 time-of-day variants for the backgrounds.

[ thank you alpha testers for discussing this problem with me and helping me find a game plan! ]

The other major game development event last week was me kinda going off the rails and committing 2.5 work days to creating a custom sprite of Mason with a crossbow.

Originally, the game had absolutely no plans for any image including a crossbow. Despite there being multiple in-game events involving the crossbow. This was bothering the shit out of me, so I figured 'how hard can it be to draw a crossbow' and made a new sprite.

It turns out, it is incredibly hard to draw a crossbow and I am definitely never doing it again x'D I researched the different kinds of crossbows and came to the unfortunate conclusion that Mason would choose a 'compound' crossbow over a 'recurve' one. Which OF COURSE is the more visually complicated one.

Thankfully, the effort paid off with a pretty cool sprite [ or at least I think so, I tried my best ] that while appearing only briefly, has a pretty interesting impact in the game.

Aside from those two things, I just continued to draw simple expression sprites and to struggle with Mason's more subtle looks.

I think my favourite one from last week is this kinda smug looking one

And I think that about covers it!

I should have the credits list up by tomorrow as well!

I hope you're all doing okay. I'm trying to be gentle with myself in these times since everything is just so high stress and difficult, but I know really well just how hard being gentle can be.

Stay safe out there, and thank you so much for your support.