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In detail: massage scene & skip buttons
🕑 Added 2021-07-15 07:03:48 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
I hope you're all doing well :) Here's a small update on what I've been doing!
Glueing things together
Well, for the last two weeks I've been putting together Lorza's story in the game-engine.
This job always consits out of three parts; implementing gameplay, writing dialog & building the scenes from individual images. Meanwhile I also added 140 images to the game.
Now you probably won't notice it while playing, but this shot for exampe consists out of 11 seperate images.
These are the 11 image in the shot above:
- A new background, now showing the massage charts.
- A slight layer of fog, to push back the background when characters are in the room.
- The bed.
- The candle flames (they animate)
- Lorza, head & body
- Keen head & body
- The girl on the bead, head & body (...she blinks in game)
- The HUD
These images usually need to be positioned by hand & timed to the dialog. Now the real challenge here was make a good looking composition of these elements... which was often tricky because it's a pretty cramped scene.
One of the things I always want to avoid when putting together these scenes, are so called 'tangents'. These are lines 'that hit each other in a bothersome way'. You still see it happen below, where Lorza's ear touches Ninju's hair & a bit lower between Ninju's arm & Lorza her leg.
Well...I see it. But maybe you were looking at something else? ;)
So it was quite the puzzle again, but a lot of fun to do!
Skip buttons - in detail
Now, here's another image I wanted to share. It might not look like much, but I'm sure many of you will be happy to see this :)
With these buttons you can skip foreward to different chapters in the game!
And this should avoid mandatory replays after a game-update (because code changes, break save games).
Soooo, why didn't I add these buttons sooner you might wonder? Well, that is because it required a lot of manual input to make a button work.
You see, each time you do something in game -like, pick up an item- a trigger is switched.
Now to skip forward, I need to manually switch all triggers you would normally pass when progressing through a storyline - till the new starting point.
And there are a lot of triggers in the game :)
For example; the button 'Start at Sophie'-button, looks like this behind the scenes -->
Well here are only 84 lines shown here, but this list for Sophie actually ends at line 262 :)
So, doing this by hand wasn't really possible - it's quite error prone & I would also need to redo it after each update (because new triggers are constantly being added to the game).
But now Rob (the new programmer I colaborate with) found a code-trick to quickly gather these trigger settings & put them into a list. And this makes it finally possible to add these buttons.
So, thank you Rob!
A glimpse!
Well, I've actually worked on some more content. But since I don't want to spoil the surprise, I can't show too much. However, here is a glimpse of a new scene that I just added to the game, I wonder if you can guess what's going on here :)
But, no worries. The next update is almost done, and then you can see everything for yourself! The last thing I still need to do, is make an extra XXX scene for Lorza, to give the current update a nice conclusion.
I think the update should be ready before the end of the month... and perhaps even a bit sooner.
Well, that's all I have for now. I hope you enjoy the next update :)
All the best!
Robin
Comments
Robin
Thank you so much for sharing that Dacer! I think at my core I really am a storyteller, before I am an illustrator. So to me, these details always matter a lot & I'm just super happy to read that you notice it & enjoy it as well ;) So thank you! I still have many more stories planned, that rely on similair details. So I hope you will like those as well :) All the best! Robin
Dacer
Hey Robin! New Patron here, and I just finished playing the new build yesterday. I really like Lorza (heck, I really like all the characters, and how you write them), and I was especially impressed with the small ways you chose to make the unclothed Lorza look more non-human. I'm not talking about the "plot development" -related revelation that Keen will have to help to address (and I won't spoiler that here!), I'm talking about the small design additions, like the fact that her breasts -- while analogous to human breasts -- are obviously different, and I think I noticed the suggestion that her navel and feet are not identical to human parts either. I absolutely appreciate that you add in details like these, when even some big-budget SF movies don't make a real effort to suggest alien physiology which isn't either randomly cosmetic, or else "monstrous". Thank you for all your hard work!
Robin
Well it's more that she got few lines of text; which requires me to name her :) But I actually have names for all the characters that appear on the ship, even though you might never see them. It's just easier when I'm writing or planning, to name characters :)
Plipoot
Great job on the chapter skip! It's a super usefull feature; especially for people who have already played the previous game updates. :) Also.. "Ninju"? This girl has an actual name? So, is she like a new major character? ;)
