July Progress Report (Create All Humans!)

Big month so far. Getting a new programmer up to speed, hosted the first in-person meeting since January to get the team acquainted and unravel the backend workings of the game. We'll be meeting like this every Friday and having Discord checkups each Wednesday to keep things moving forward.

It's been like getting a peek at what running a legit indie studio would feel like. (If only I wasn't the only full-timer on this... A Yotes can dream.)

Aside from that awesomeness, tons of work got done on NPCs. Drawing sprites for each and every type of person in the game along with some variants to spice things up, reusing pieces and swapping colors to make the population as pixel-art efficient and visually vibrant as possible.

Having lots of fun mixing and matching for these things, the only characters left to make are the unique looking major characters (the bosses of each area). Every encounter planned for the story from gangsters to ravers to catgirls. Getting base designs done so we can finally see what the human side of BGP's Pinto region looks like.

Once all those are done, I'll get started on those Patron-based characters for all you early birds that earned the Canon Character Tier through accumulated donations over time. (More on that next month)

***

For a somewhat interesting breakdown, here's how a few of these got made using sprites from other games as a reference/mood board to match the idea in my head then shaping up the sprites using my NPC templates as a base so it'll be easy to fully animate them later.

Like here is the idea for the To Be Named mysterious silent rival character. Was originally going for a blank faced, closed-eyes Frisk kind of kid but the sprite just looked off to me and it didn't gel with the cool stuff he does in the cutscenes I had in mind so I looked around for some spiky haired tough-looking inspiration and settled on this more Vegeta widow's peak & spiky hair bun flavor. 

And I really like how this coal miner/construction guy turned out. The dark color theme will match the environment well.

The lady you'll be talking to when signing up for stadium matches and official things like that. Palette swaps come easy with uniformed characters.

And then there's the party animals and mishmashes of other character sprites to fill in the maps and scenes requiring an archetype like the ravers for the party scene where you'll meet the Maven of Neon City.

I think you get the picture. Doing this for each NPC type occupied this week's progress as far as the art department goes, meanwhile the stats menu is being coded and a few bugs are being squashed with the battle system (looks like we have to redo the move animation system again). 

75% complete up in here! (with this one screen at least, but it'll ramp up fast now that the new guy is into it. The ropes have been seen.)

Exciting things are comin' ya'll. Please bear with us through the hiccups, and we'll be getting that next big update out as soon as it's playable.

- This has been Tony Yotes on behalf of the Yotes Games Team