[un]Divine game dev update #13 (Patreon)

cracks knuckles 😤

Since the last update the BGs situation is now:

3 BGs (out of 25) left for line art

8 more BGs have base (sunset) colors bringing the total to 21 out of 25

The ones left to start coloring are the 3 Dorm BGs and the first room of the game! I actually had to redesign/redraw the first Dorm BG bc I wasn't satisfied with it.

This is the last time I'll have to redraw a BG entirely I swear. It's better to scrap stuff at the sketch stage if I'm not feeling the design bc I'll regret it the longer I pretend it's not a problem lol. This has happened with West and East buildings' 1st floors, the North Corridor and the library's bottom floor:

This old library version was uniquely broken bc my original idea was the player being able to walk through each row of shelves but then:

Daniel/Esther clips through each shelf because there's no differentiating between being in front or behind diagonal objects

so I planned to instead have each row of shelves it's own BG but as a result I'd have to draw hundreds of books

if I disabled being able to walk through the shelves entirely then it would be confusing for the player to see all that inaccessible space

The new version solves all these problems and I only had to draw a fraction of the books! 🎉

I'm still grinding out these BGs bc both animation and music depends on these being done. Several BGs have multiple color variations (eg: sunset vs night time) but not all of them, for example inside school buildings won't be accessible at night. Thanks to comics I'm really fast at BGs especially coloring them so soon... these will be done!!

In other areas of work:

cutscenes are almost all done!

Dan's run cycles are halfway done!

1 NPC walk cycle is almost done!

I can't share a lot of these going forward since I'm at a point where it will be spoilers 💦 except Dan's and Esther's sprite models of course.

One more thing: I have a working UI design for character dialogue now, it just needs some tweaks. I like the new font a lot~ 🥹