Pic 241: Sprites (Patreon)

I was thinking, what haven't I shared on Patreon, and the only thing I can think of is "sprites" which is what Renpy calls PNG files that are shown in front of backgrounds.

My first ever gaming computer, a Commodore 64, called them the same thing. Even major AAA games use them in scenes sometimes. There are nearly 300 of them in the game, and theoretically could be a lot more except that I figured out how to change the color, brightness and shading of sprites to get them to blend in any background.

For example, the park is not as well lit as Ariane's living room and displaying this sprite, would look awful. But if I apply a filter like: matrixcolor ContrastMatrix(0.7) * BrightnessMatrix(-0.2) which lowers the brightness 20% and the contrast 30% (full contrast is 1.0) it results in a sprite that blends in.

Renpy is even smart enough to apply shadows so the sprite looks like it really is in the picture.

The 300 "sprites" are of Ariane in various poses and various states of dress that could be placed in front of background. This museum set is mostly Ariane free. The pictures of her in front of the paintings is done on a different set.

Another secret: You almost never see the full sprites. All the Ariane sprites go from head to ankle, and are positioned to seem as natural as possible, which as you see cut off the sprite at the knee.

Even more secret: The player images that appear when the player speaks are also full body sprites that get cut off mid torso. Only a handful of scenes show more This was all to make things more flexible.

So if I wanted to make Ariane show up to the night club naked (which I believe is literally the only place she doesn't), that is doable fairly easy.

Date Ariane 2 Progress

Last week I spent creating new paths for the game. This week was making sure all the achievements were doable. I erased all the settings and saved games to the point where players will be when they first launch the game, and then tried to get all 79 of the achievements. There was at least one that wasn't.

I took the achievements from 1.5 and updated them and put them in the game wiki.

Date Ariane 2.0 does not have the highlighted paths that 1.5 did. I could add them in the future but I think everyone played the game with them on and missed a lot of content.

But there does need to be some kind of help in the game. So I created a PDF file attached below that can be viewed in any browser, or printed if you want, with all the paths and help with the preference screen, and a full list of where the "Impressions" can be earned. I'm attaching it below.

By the way, every time I played the game to get these achievements, I found bugs in the game, and I've been squashing them as fast as possible, meaning the beta from a week ago is already out of date.

I know I will never squash all the bugs before release, so I decided that I want to release the game publicly in early February, maybe even February 1. There may be one more beta release before that happens.