31/10/2024 -- Happy Halloween!

Hello, and happy Halloween!

When I was a child, I had a huge fascination with monsters and other 'spooky' things, but I actually used to be a little afraid of Halloween, despite never celebrating it. I thought it had some kind of atmospheric effect that drastically increased my chances of seeing a ghost. Luckily that never happened, but unfortunately I'm still not really doing anything special for the occasion this year, and instead just have to go to work at my job :(.

Sadly, the most frightening thing about my life lately has been watching my Aseprite playtime on Steam creep closer towards 3000 hours as I've been working more on SBH's graphic assets.

More City Maps

I've managed to get two more of the game's major outdoor locations into a playable (but very unfinished) state. My intent at the moment is to get the overworld into the correct 'shape' so that I can start accurately implementing gameplay and cutscenes into them, but with a lot of finer details left out to leave room for changes and additions later on if necessary. A lot of the undecorated generic buildings you can see are just temporary placeholders.

The first location is the West Jadewater Backstreets--an older and relatively quiet street with a handful of small businesses to visit, and also where Yuri lives!

The second is Northbay, a recreational hotspot of stores and attractions only a few blocks away from the beach.

Coming up with all the unique building designs is tiring, but I find it to be a lot of fun. (Though I think I might actually change VR Supernova's main color from blue to purple to make it stand out more next to Mercury.)

With these two areas done (for now), it leaves only two more major outdoor locations to make--one of which is the gigantic 'Downtown' area that currently looks like this:

...Which I'm a little intimidated to start work on, and might put off doing for a while to avoid completely exhausting myself on map making.

Script Converter Tool & Cutscene Progress

I've also been steadily working on more of the game's early story cutscenes. I've been doing things in chronological order, and the order in which I've been making assets has been generally dictated by what the story requires, as I feel like it gives me a clear and easy to follow plan of how to approach what's otherwise a very imposing amount of work.

To help with the cutscene making, I actually used Gamemaker and a little Javascript to build myself a small 'script converter' program, that converts character dialogue written in plain text into cutscene code, effectively allowing me to directly copy and paste my script documents directly into the game!

EG. Taking the text:

"SAKI: What do you mean?
...Is there something else going on?
/Livio shrugs
LIVIO: ...No idea."

And replacing the linebreaks with a placeholder "|n" symbol using a slightly modified version of this code:

"SAKI: What do you mean?|n...Is there something else going on?|n/Livio shrugs|nLIVIO: ...No idea."

Will cause the converter program to output it as:

...Which can then be pasted directly into a cutscene! It's a little ugly, but very effective.

I still have to manually set things like dialogue portrait expressions and pauses in the textboxes, but it saves me an incredible amount of time that I'd otherwise have to spend copy and pasting every individual line of dialogue.

Conclusion

As a final footnote, I also managed to finished the portraits of and made character pages for Gale and Lana last week, and I'm pretty happy with how they've both turned out. Check them out if you're interested.

Thanks for reading, and happy Halloween! | - HSTopaz

17/10/2024 -- First Battle Cutscene!

As a follow-up to the previous post, here's an early showcase of one of the game's first scenes in full, including the first tutorial fight.

Most of the cutscene is finished, barring the placeholder music and Saki's bag disappearing in some animations. The overworld bridge environment is also not entirely finished, and is missing background NPCs, proper lighting on the signs, and general polish. Still, I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out overall. It's my first time publicly showing off a finished(ish) cutscene sequence, so I hope you like it!

- HSTopaz

11/10/2024 -- Opening Sequence Progress

The game's opening sequence is now mostly complete! :)

It contains the game's first few tutorial battles, and covers Saki's arrival in Jadewater, her discovery of the Otherworld, and obtaining her power.

It feels incredibly exciting to finally see the story in a somewhat presentable state after daydreaming about it for so long. I already had most of the animations and cutscene code created from an old demo I gave to some friends a year or two back, so I've mostly spent the past few days refining the code and the script, and transferring the cutscenes to the finished versions of the maps.

I'll get around to uploading some footage in the coming days. My only real reservation about actually showing off some cutscenes at this point in time is that I'm still using placeholder music borrowed from other games, but I think I'll just have to swallow my pride on that for now.

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While working on these scenes, I also finally got around to making myself some basic in-game cutscene debugging tools, that let me pause scenes and move characters and props around during runtime. The most annoying part of implementing cutscenes so far has been estimating the camera and character positions correctly based on the room editor while writing out the code, so I honestly have no idea why I didn't think of creating an in-game way to test them sooner. Hopefully it should makes things a lot smoother.

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Another major help while working on these scenes was that I finally cracked and got myself a second monitor. I bought a very old spare monitor from a thrift store for five dollars ages ago with the intent to use it as a second one while drawing, but ended up getting annoyed with how much desk space it took up and how different it felt than what I was used to, so I quickly abandoned the idea. After years of stubbornly refusing to give it a second chance, however, I've finally realized that the convenience and quality of life that having a second screen brings to coding a game is unmatched. I feel like a fool for not doing this sooner.

(...Please don't laugh at the resolution.)

Thanks for reading! | - HSTopaz

08/10/2024 -- Opening Cutscene Preview

A short snippet of the game's first cutscene, in which Sakiko wakes up from a dream on a train. The station platform is still a little unfinished, but everything else is complete.

- HSTopaz

04/10/2024 -- Leon King!

Hello! I've done a couple things over the past few days.

Firstly, I finally made portrait art for the tutorial boss, Leon!

He's one of the first characters encountered--a petty gang leader that Saki has the misfortune of angering, and who inadvertently ends up dragging her into the town's supernatural phenomena. He's kind of a smug loser, which is a lot of fun to draw facial expressions for.

I'll get around to adding a character bio page for him sometime soon.

With most necessary maps finished, I've also started working on formally putting together the game's opening sequence. Right now, I'm currently in the process of slightly retooling the way the game handles cutscenes to be more manageable on a large scale, because it's kind of cumbersome at the moment.

(^ The game's very first cutscene is also almost entirely finished...!)

- HSTopaz

01/10/2024 -- Rosebank Bridge Map Progress

Hey! Starting this month, I've decided to trial formatting this blog in more of a 'feed' style, with more frequent smaller posts grouped together by month, rather than the larger longform posts I've been making. Writing those large posts has been a little intimidating up until now, so I'm hoping this format might be a little more casual and let me talk about smaller things more frequently.

Over the past week, I've been working on drawing another of the game's major areas, the Rosebank Bridge--a small pedestrian bridge surrounded by a handful of riverside stores and restaurants.

It's still a little unfinished at the moment, but my goal at the moment is mostly to have the general design and layout of every major location planned out so that I can start accurately implementing all of the gameplay elements and cutscenes. Still, I'm pretty happy with how it looks so far. I'm excited to eventually have all the signs glowing in the evening light!

(The staircases are actually a massive pain for collision and depth, though. I think they're the only sideways facing staircases in the whole game, too...)

- HSTopaz