Developer Diary 6 (Patreon)

Well, this was a week of frustrations and disappointments. First I will talk about the things that went right.

I managed to find a solution for my UI that was pretty easy, and solved the issue of light backgrounds. After a bunch of experiments with solutions I didn’t like, I ended up adding a simple generic ‘button’ graphic behind all my buttons, which made it so they are visible at all times.

I realized that I needed a 4th hair layer after I noticed the glasses I added were misbehaving. Without going into too much detail, I needed to make sure I had a hair layer that could go over the glasses as well as under, while still being in front of the actual face. Together with the two hair layers that go behind the face, that makes four now.

After that I drew a new, long hairstyle which I am quite happy with.

This is where things started going less great.

On Tuesday I tried to test my game on my Android device. I realized I could not export to .apk (the file type needed for mobile devices) and I needed an Android Module to be able to export my game. Sadly it turns out since I am using GM 1.4, the module is no longer for sale, since it is no longer officially supported. This frustrated me greatly, but luckily I remembered I had bought the modules through the Humble Bundle a year or two back. I went through a very tedious set of tasks to allow GM to export to .apk and when I finally thought I could test it, my phone refused to be recognized by Windows. I spent hours trying to find solutions, but to no avail. At last I dug up my old and beaten Nexus 5 and after charging it finally got to try it out.

My takeaway is that the mobile version needs a completely different UI, and that I currently don’t know how to deal with juggling two versions of a game (PC and mobile), so I may have to make a hard decision about that soon.

That day I also drew the graphics for one bra to fit all current breast sizes and implemented them without much hassle.

On Wednesday I spent a few hours drawing the first top for her. That went well until I noticed one glaring issue: the graphic of the bra was peeking out behind the top I had drawn. I solved it by going back and drawing the top wider so it would overlap the bra, but realized that this solution is not ideal.

Thursday morning I found out my PC had crashed so I lost all the unsaved work for the tops I had drawn, but since I needed to redo them anyway, the pill was not as bitter to swallow.

Finally today I had some more time to work on something that had (by now) become a pretty big deal in my head: how to I mask out clothing so they do not extend beyond clothes that are worn over them?

To explain: Imagine a T-shirt with wide sleeves. Now you wear a tight sweater on top. How do I make it so the sleeves stay ‘within’ the sweater? I thought I could simply use the outline of the body to mask out the T-shirt so only the part ‘inside’ the body is visible, but that would mean anywhere where the T-shirt sticks out of the sweater it would not be able to overlap the skin. And this system would need to work for ALL exceptions. Needless to say: my courage sank to my feet today. This is a big problem. If it cannot be solved using code, I will need to think of other solutions, which ( I fear) might hurt the customization of the character.

I initially wanted it like this:

Top 1 [sweater, jacket, ...]

Top 2 [t-shirt, tank top, …]

Top 3 [bra, bikini,..]

But right now I don’t know how I would make that happen. I can mask out parts of a graphic (I use that technique for the eyes) but there are simply too many exceptions for this to simply work. I imagine this is all I will be working on next week.

On a final note, I am currently using Bubblegum Sunday as the working title. Do you like it?

Anyway, hopefully I have more luck next week. Thank you for reading.

Albatross