Devblog #41 (Patreon)

Hey, Wizards!

Shady Character One here!

I am going full swing in preparation for the Major update, so this week I focused on the girl-events that will be included in it. When I report on "finishing writing the event" that usually only mean that that's exactly what I did. Wrote the event itself. But after writing the event, there's still some work that needs to be done before I can actually put the event into the game. The sprites need to be added if they are already in the game, or cut, properly named and coded, if they are new sprites. The code must be actually added to the event, and the triggers for it must be placed in the code. Also, all the text needs to be translated. So these are all the tasks I was busy with.

I have translated all the events aside from Katelyn's and added sprites for Elizabeth's and Gwen's. Katelyn's and Violet's sprites need to be prepared from scratch. The former is brand new. The latter had some adjustments made to it, and sadly, they were major enough to not fit with what I had already implemented. Hopefully I will be able to finish everything this week and maybe will even have some time to actually test the stuff.

Also, after receiving some feedback, Shady Two and I decided that the early game needs a bit more work put into it, so after this upcoming update we will spend some time on the first couple dozen minutes of the game. Artworks, interface and most importantly - backgrounds. This would mean that there will be less forward-looking content for a bit, but hopefully it will make the game more palatable for new players and colorful for returning ones.

For that reason, I spent several hours trying to model some of the school in Sims 4, so that Shady Two would have easier time drawing the BGs. Some reference is better than none. The houses are very scarcely described in the game, and that's mostly because I was really hoping that by now we would already have at least some backgrounds of them drawn. With luck, making these mock-ups will speed that process up. I will also need to add the actual houses' descriptions at some point, because none of you know, that Ruachan's live in a seven-storey tower (which should really be circular, but Sims 4 did not allow me to do that)

And that House Cairngorm is housed in a four-storey fort-like building

I am always a bit apprehensive about adding descriptions of the school into the game, because I am afraid that it will drag the gameplay too much, and I am really relying on the visuals to eventually fill that void. What do you all think? Do we need more visual descriptions in the game? What do you think about these mock-ups? Tell me in the comments.

See you next week!Shady Character One, out!