Love elemental reveal + Devlog #140 + Illustration poll #14 is on! (Patreon)

Happy Halloween!
Here is Love elemental (aka Puzzle girl)!!!
There's so much to say about her, it's hard to know where to start... First of all, her mods were Trying to solve herself, Top starts loose/baggy & ends tight/fitted and Floating body parts.
This was definitely one of the weirder submissions, and as such it turned out to be fairly freeform, it could have gone many ways! Ultimately, I figured that a body that could fit the idea of a "Puzzle girl" was an articulated figma! It's not a puzzle per see of course, but they usually come with multiple interchangeable parts, which fit the description well enough for me. And not just that, but it also solved the Floating body parts mod, as interchangeable limbs! It was also a good opportunity to give her some creepy looking ones, which, creepy was always the path I wanted to take with her ^^
Finally, figmas usually have an articulated stand as well, which in her case is hand shaped and used to move around.
Trying to solve herself was also a very strange mod to figure out. She's missing a jigwas piece in her forehead, which can be seen floating in her brain, inspired by one of these sphere maze toys. And as you can see, she's constantly trying to solve her own brain by using her Burr puzzle hands, of which the pieces serve as fingers in its unsolved form...! By the way, the limb locking mechanisms are Da Vinci cryptexes. I hope this is puzzly enough :B
Finally, her loose to baggy top ended up being turned into a light dress, which becomes tighter and more revealing as her ranks increase. Though in the early ranks, I still wanted her slihouette to be visible through the dress!
In the end, designing her very much became a puzzle in and of itself, but I couldn't be happier with the result which, once again, Chitei drew beautifully! He did a crazy good job and paid great attention to the various intricacies of the design, and improved the pose in a way that makes her look much more intimidating than my original ref. It's so good ^^

I hope you'll like her!

Here are all the monstergirl ranks (BOOBS!!!):

Rank 1

Rank 2

Rank 3

Rank 4

Rank 5

You can follow/support Chitei here:

https://www.patreon.com/cw/u27507852 (18+)
https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/1484994 (18+)
https://x.com/rai32019 (18+)

TODO list!

- Secret feature: main gameplay loop

- Secret feature: polishing

- Improved Soul drop system

- Improved Shape fight drops

- Improved spell related system

- Improved eaten food check function

- Improved item description system

- Improved "?" menu button system

- Improved Almanach system (visually the same for you, easier to work with for me)

- New Almanach entries system

- New Almanach entries

- New sub quests

- Witch swap related improvements

- More SFX improvements and audio balancing

- Hold a button to keep moving in a direction

- Unique skills for all characters

- Better balancing

- Add some illustrations in game (including some of the ones that have been voted on!)

- Ability to rewatch and skip rank up animations

- More settings (including some accessibility settings)

- Funnee

- Ability to ignore fights if that enemy has been defeated enough times

- Another surprise (actually mostly done already)

- A little bit more story content

- Rework the Sablee ocean dungeon

- Small Biscotti tunnel modifications

- Texture prefetch/ flush improvements (optimization)

- Write new party events

- Add more party events

- Write some rank up events

- Add rank up events

- Draw the remaining demo chibis (Tiger, Hydra, Dragon, Axelle, Saen'Liz)

- Implement the new chibis

- Various smaller improvements

Like I said in the last devlog, I spent some time working on the remaining chibis this month! Which also means that I have a bit less to share however...!
But, both Saen'Liz and Tiger girl's chibi sprites, including the ranks, are fully finished! They turned out excellent and I'll be revealing them next month instead of a new character! Still, drawing both of these chibi sets from zero did take 20 days, which has made me think a bit about what's next. There are many characters' chibis left to draw, possibly enough to keep me busy for a full year...! Which is scary to think about. One way I thought of to make this work would be to first focus on everything else in the game. Once I'm closer to the end of development, I would only draw the R1 Idle pose for every character that doesn't have a chibi yet (though I would still finish some more!), and release the game in early access. The idea would be that the full game would be playable, all that'd be missing would be chibi sprites which I'd keep working on, leaving early access once all of them are implemented. It's only an idea for now, but it does sound like a sensible thing to do to me. Please do let me know if you have any thoughts on this!

I did also take a few days off since my parents visited me for my birthday, but I was able to work for the rest of the month, including on a bunch of stuff that is part of the "Various smaller improvements" category! By the way, I've removed "Various small exploration related improvements" from the list above since it was pretty much the same thing.

So!
First of all, all of the area pictures have been drawn and implemented! That is, the pictures in the bottom left of the screen during exploration. No more Sablee ocean everywhere ^^
I also implemented a few map related improvements:

• In the map menu, if you select a room that leads to a different area / floor, a special button will appear. Clicking that button will open said destination's floor / area map, with the destination room selected, making it easier to navigate.

• In the map menu, rooms can in rare cases have the same coordinates (for example, Fei springs are in the same spot as the Fei spring portals). When selecting such a room, special buttons appear, letting you select any of these room, meaning you can now actually see and edit their note.

• In the map menu and in exploration mode, multiple color buttons will appear below the note if the room has a note. You can click any of them to chance the color of the note icon on the map! This is especially useful to differentiate between several types of notes. For example, harvestables can be green, hints can be red, unsolved puzzles can be blue, this kind of thing. This makes it very easy to parse information when looking at the map, as long as you're consistent with your coloring...!

• Some map and note values didn't update correctly if left open during exploration while also opening the map and editing the note there (+ some other factors) > fixed

Good stuff taken care of!
I then took care of some darkening / fade issues. I'm not sure if anyone ever noticed but it turned out that after loading a save file, some elements in exploration mode would appear brighter than the rest while the dark fade out was happening. This is something that had been bothering me for maybe two years now, and it turned out that there were actually two layers of black fade out happening at the same time. So this issue that no one would probably ever have noticed is now fixed!
Something a bit more noticeable has to do with foregrounds elements and fights. When a fight appears, the screen darkens and only the characters and the fight itself keep their original colors. This was achieved by simply drawing a transparent black rectangle between the characters and everything in the background, but anything in the foreground keeps its original color. This one was especially troublesome because I couldn't think of any easy way to do this. I can't just draw another rectangle because it would show as an obvious out of place darker chunk, I need only the precise shape of the foreground stuff to darken. Chances were I would have to create a shader just for this, apply it (or not) if the conditions were right, create additional shaders for every foreground element that already uses one, it was a huge pain. Until I remembered about image_blend...! A default gamemaker value you can use to tint sprites! It almost never came into play until now, so it completely slipped my mind. But after just a bit of tinkering that value, I was able to fix this issue that had been present since the very beginning! I was extremely happy with this, and it even applies in cutscenes and anywhere else I need it to really, it's perfect ^^

Other than the Tiger and Saen'Liz chibis, the only listed task I crossed out this time was the ability to skip rank up animations. I considered being able to rewatch them, but it didn't seem worthwhile to me all things considered, so I only did the skip!

Finally, here is a quick list of minor fixes:

• Added windows on houses in Sablee (I had the sprites ready all this time and completely forgot about them...)

• Fixed a palm tree showing on top of the transition effect when exiting the blue cave in Sablee

• Cleaner foreground Sablee / Rietti cave sprites during room transitions

• You now cannot continue the story by talking to Cerelea until Rose and T are Rank 2

• Thorns spell description has been updated (Deals some extra damage to the opponent with every spell you cast)

• Some particle effects would keep playing during fights and in some other cases when pausing the game > fixed

• I changed fights to be smashable not just after all color affinities of that enemy type has been discovered (which was a change from last month I believe), but also after that enemy type has been defeated at least 3 times. Both conditions need to be met. Alternatively the current 10 levels above the enemy condition also works.

I'm sorry if it seems like less progress was made than last month, the "Various smaller improvements" collection of tasks is what I mainly focused on this time. That, and the chibi sprites are just that much of a chunker task...! I'm getting through these though, I'm thinking I might do one chibi set a month until the last 3 are done. There are a few other chunker tasks left (or at least intimidating ones) that have to do with the extra story content, the last SFX / audio balancing, as well as something very special for that secret feature I keep mentioning that is pretty stressful. Which, I hope I can have some good news to report about in the next devlog...! It'll be a big weight off my shoulders if I can make that happen.
But yeah, other than that I plan to update Sablee ocean and do the small Biscotti tunnel edits soon, and it might be time to look into the unique skills now, and surely more ^^
Getting there!

And I think that's everything I have to say for now!

And now, the poll stuff!

The next illustration poll has begun! The theme this time is [Freeform]!
You can vote in the Discord server if you are a 2$+ patron! Here are the current theme and submissions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Drz4UD09YftgaihcwWq6McqiFTa2l77XJ9oBJ0hfDco

This time's concept art, Scylla!
Still very happy with this one, look at that proud goofy face 😊

And that's all for now!
Thank you very much for reading! :B