Weekly Update (9-2-2024) (Patreon)

Pretty good progress this week, in spite of various difficulties (mostly I've been very tired lately from all the IRL stuff; August was a really draining month in that regard). I've decided this will probably be a slightly shorter update, in the 50k words range as opposed to the 70-80k of the last two. There are two main reasons for this, somewhat related. One is that I could use a break to hopefully overcome how tired I've been a bit more fully and the other is, I'm not really sure there's time to plan and start another section without the update going long time-wise, since I still need to leave time for combat and playtesting.

When exactly that means it will be out isn't 100% clear. The 20th seems most likely, but the 13th is possible if I get through the rest of the writing quickly and combat and playtesting go smoothly. Will see. Definitely see later in the month as more likely. but regardless, not too far off. On a related note, I received a final draft of Ligaea's new art from Mimo today. One thing I may consider for the future is trying to commission some soldier portraits, so that the different duchies have more variety.

Someone on the blog suggested redistributing the existing assets to make different duchies' soldiers more unique, but I think that would be very confusing at this point in time, and I've basically already explored all the available sets of generic soldier RPG maker style assets that I'm aware of. Ultimately. I think it's easy to underestimate just how many assets the game already has. There are currently 521 sets of faces in the game, some of which actually contain multiple characters (though, of course, other characters have multiple sets; Alexander has four sheets).

I've hit against the outer bounds of what's available to work with in places, and I chafe against those constraints. I've done a fair amount of work myself to expand the realm of the possible. In particular, I have some skill at recoloring assets, and I've also made a number of new expressions for characters by splicing together different parts of existing ones. I think the most impactful here are Lorena and Sindarion, who originally only had one sheet each but I've expanded them each to 3, allowing for a much wider range of possible expressions. It was fascinating, in a way, to feel like the possibilities for what kind of person Lorena could be opened up as I expanded her expressions. But this isn't something that will work to make more varied soldiers beyond what I've already done (which is basically recoloring the same set of expressions for different duchies). So, it seems like an area where some expansion is merited, especially since this game features a lot of solders.

Anyway, back to work for now. Despite the slowed progress from the IRL crap, I am pretty happy with the way things are shaping up. This update contains a couple of things that I've had planned out for a very long time, so it's been very satisfying to have actually reached them.