May Progress Report (Patreon)

Getting into crunch time since I'm still aiming to release Tainara's episode at the end of the month. Honestly, I don't know if I'm going to make it; in terms of something I can call a 1.0 version at least, but I'll definitely have it playable in some state. Might not get a couple optional scenes in and some of the sounds/music might not be complete yet. That kinda stuff.

Some *good* news, but also one of those things that might not make it for said release: I've been looking into ways to get some animations into the game, a sample of which is attached to the post! Definitely let us know what you think. The animation was done by StickJump. You can check out his own page/projects here: https://www.patreon.com/SJAnimation

It's puppet-style animation made by editing the original still cg, but it wasn't originally made with animation in mind so there's some limitations. On the other hand this style of animation is a lot cheaper and faster to produce than traditional frame-by-frame animation and doesn't require the artist and animator to be the same person. However, it's still twice the cost/effort over just using still CGs, so I really want to know if YOU think the results are worth it.
If I have the time to; I'm going to experiment with making the animation interactive. (in a simple way.) So once the animation is fully implemented in a build I'll gather feedback and figure out the best way to potentially implement more animated scenes in future content.

Dunno if I've mentioned it here or somewhere before, but there's a really nice looking new tool for VN development in Unity called Naninovel which seems to blow anything similar I've used in the past out of the water. Or... at least it will once it's done since it's still in development/beta. It's shaping up to pretty much have the perfect feature set for this series as a whole moving forward so I'm considering just switching to it now but again, it's still in beta and not 100% complete so that might bite me in the ass trying to push out an end of month build. Its scripting system is 10x faster for actually getting the story/dialogue in the game than the node-based systems most other vn/dialogue unity tools use though so it might actually ease the crunch-time rush.  Speaking of the unity asset store, I might have splurged a bit on the May asset sale to pick up some stuff for future episodes and other projects, but I'm going to focus hard on getting this episode out ASAP before messing with the new toys.