reward updates, prayers to the bone lords, and babie (Patreon)

clocking in once more to happily report that the wheel of fate is slowly beginning to turn again.

first, some changes to reward tiers as of a few days ago!

Removals:

• level 25-- trainer details no longer apply to a game without trainers
• level 50-- no longer filling sprite requests
• level 100-- no longer doing custom characters

although seeing custom characters go is disappointing to many people, they have already been off the table for a while because they emphatically are not a practical amount of work to keep up with, especially moving on to future projects :c 

Additions and Changes:

• level 10-- names in game still apply to starlight! it is a common feature of tRPGs to have even random enemies be named, and I am all for adding names based on you all to the pool! we won't be collecting this quite yet but it is still on the table!
• level 25-- we'll be posting project files instead! for those of you looking to learn or just curious about the behind-the-nitty-gritty, look forward to .psds/etc of art, maps, music, or whatever we can share!
• level 50-- the neo-opal patron wall was really nice and I would like to do something like that again to shout out VIPs in the game itself!
• level 100-- there are some things i'd like to explore for the level 100 reward, like working with us to  Design an Item, or an NPC, or Sidequest-- or something like that! But I am not currently committing to the details of that yet until we're a little further along in development where we can be actively working on that as content!

Friends, What Else Can We Do?

I did a round of research and tried to find some other game dev patreons and see what else other folks are doing! ....And through google, I found a couple... But I am not the army you all are. So let me ask you-- is there anything in particular that you all know other dev patreons do that you think might be a good fit for us? I am open to ideas, hearing about others' approaches, and finding ways to make it practical. 

...anyway, development!
it is happening again, kind of!

at some point in the near-ish future there's going to be a post about what exactly my short-term goals with starlight are, refreshing everyone here who might still mainly be left over from reborn about what that project means to do, generally selling it, blahblahblah
but first i need to work out some stuff related to that with the team,
and before that i've needed to make some decisions about the immediate direction of the project,
and that's involved doing some preliminary programming.

so let's start by talking about that.  

we have these fancy combat scenes, right, like this

and those 2d models are, in the demo, animated using a program called DragonBones!

here's an old example screenshot of how DragonBones looks:

It uses those lines on the model to create a timeline of movement by rotating and moving parts of the animation. This is called skeletal animation!

Unfortunately, DragonBones sux. It is a free program, but it is laggy and choppy and most of the documentation for it is in Chinese. Actually, at the time we started using it there actually was zero english documentation for it and learning it from scratch was a mess. I am also pretty sure it has not been updated in years, but I cannot confirm this because the website is broken and also in Chinese.

And then there's Spine. I assume no one has ever heard of DragonBones, but you might've heard of Spine. Fundamentally, the two programs do the exact same thing, but Spine has more features, is actively maintained, doesn't shoot any computer's performance through the ground if you so much as look at the onion skin feature, and critically, has infinitely more documentation and support in a language we are capable of reading.

Um, it kind of feels like this...

Spine is a paid program, but thanks to you all ( much love !!!!! ) that isn't a problem for us right now. 

The problem is that fence in the middle-- and that is compatibility. Starlight is using RMMV, and there was a plugin to use DragonBones with RMMV. I thought there was a similar plugin for Spine, and embarked on a journey to make it work under the assumption that there was one, but on day one I realized that the plugin was never actually finished or posted, and so we were somewhat on our own. 

So in short, our first move has been to make sure that we even can use Spine with our game. The past few days have kind of been a slog on and off of trying to just get any animation to display via Spine instead of DragonBones. There was no guarantee it would work.
But!!
Eventually !!!
After mysteriously trying like eight different versions of the graphics library file for it !!!!
We were granted  L E G S

the models are naturally much larger and then scaled down in game for quality... we can show her properly too!

erm... "properly". the model is a little scuffed since it was just recreated in spine for testing.

and we can try animating it!!!

it resulted in this!!!!

where did her arm and head go !!! they were supposed to move, not disappear!!!!!

(it turned out to be because of the way we were positioning the model, idk.)

but the point is everything is fine now, we got it to work with a different model as a proof of concept that working with spine in RMMV is possible! with that established, i can now go on to figure out the rest of our workload, which is, as one might guess, substantial. 

but this has been baby steps with amethyst liddell !!!!!

however, secretly, every step is made of baby??

it is not the 100th strike that breaks the stone, but the 99 before it !!!

baby !!!!!!!

this is not the babie that steps are made of, but my lawyers have suggested we include multiple pictures of her for the general delight of our readership.

and as a bonus, one (1) scrunge:

^ me trying to work out 3rd party compatibility tbh.

that's it for now. this is mainly just to say that we're getting back on the road and expect more soon!