Progress update for 08-01-2023

2023, how time flies! I hope you all had a wonderful festive period, and an amazing start to the new year. It's an exiting time, and I think the coming year will be plenty big for summer growth! Yes, I did just try to force that pun. 

The last few weeks have mostly been fixing the few minor bugs that have come up, and planning ahead. With the current workload and the features we got planned, the contributors and I sat around and planned the new update. For the next one we plan to work on simply adding more written content; little gameplay additions, and a lot of new events, dates and main story content. We decided on this focus as the game is more and more becoming 'feature complete'. While there still are some skills that are unused, or assets that can change, the game is in a very good place for us to add meat to the groundworks we've laid.

Personally I'm working on something that I've teased a bit here and there; a new way of rendering parts of the game. While it's still early, and I make NO promises that it'll make it into the game, I've had some very good results with something that's best shown;

As the game is all HTML based, I've managed to basically add a way of re-ordering the game content that is remarkably compatible with everything we've written so far. However, the main challenges right now are funnily enough design based, not tech-based.

The visual novel genre, which I try to emulate here, is remarkably diverse. it's a genre often used because it can be very efficient with its art assets, while still having a ton of flavor. The phoenix wright games for example use simple sprites during the court scenes, or just the NPC you're talking to on an background during the investigation parts. Even a game like Hades, that has a big budget behind it, uses it for its dialog with very few changing art assets.

The problem for Summer Growth is that, by definition, the main character is defined by her change. And those changes simply mean a LOT of art assets. Even for the mirror scene, we had to add a ton of assets. If we wanted it to work for the dialog scenes, like above, we'd need to find some way to eliminate, or work around, clothing. After all, it'd look weird if the player walked around naked. But adding clothing would add 500+ pieces of art assets (yes, soviet and I checked).

Another solution is placing the player 'behind' the camera, and use the players perspective. But that'd put the burden of the art assets on the backgrounds, that suddenly have to account for changing perspectives. And what about the NPC's? 

There is no simple solution here, and while I'm considering all angles, I'd LOVE your input here! Post games you played, systems that you'd think would work! I'd love to hear it all!