Left Hand Magic - Locations

Alright! Time for another little update on progress. While it took several days longer than I'd originally hoped, I now have the six locations needed for the intro and prologue sections of the game sorted out. Each of them may receive minor tweaking during the next step of the process, but these are essentially finished. The toxic swamp is the most likely to be tweaked in a significant way, as I'm not happy with the way the chemical spill looks, but it couldn't be fixed in Daz. I'm going to see what I can do with it in Photoshop at some point. 

Regardless, I can officially move on to the next step. Which is creating multi-emotion sprites for each character. Those of you familiar with how VNs work will be familiar with what I'm talking about when I say that, I think. Unlike most of my previous works, I'm going to actually use the sprite overlay feature of Ren'py, rather than embedding the character fully into the scene. This will allow me to progress through story creation much easier, since I won't have to re-render locations constantly. Character sprites are MUCH faster renders. Like, usually under 20 minutes instead of 3-10 hours.

Note, that this will only be for when you're walking around the world and interacting with characters/story and even there, there might be some exceptions where I don't think it looks acceptable. For Sex/H-scenes, I fully intend to work them the way I do in Haven's Port, with the characters as fully integrated into the scenes as possible. This is fairly typical of Visual Novels, of course, but I did want to explain it for those that might be less familiar with that genre.

The two locations I'm less happy about doing things this way are the two offices. Frankly, in the case of those two locations, it might prove worth it to render an extra full set of the emotion sprites with the two natives NPCs to those scenes actually sitting at their desks. It's going to have to be something I experiment with...and will probably make some examples of in order to get all of your feedback as well. It may also be something to add in later rather than at the start, depending on how things go, as it would add a lot of render time that might be better chunked up between builds.

Regardless...I'm a couple of days behind where I'd hoped to be when I mapped the month out. And I'm only even that close if we drop the rest of the base locations that I'd intended to make. I have legit no idea what that means for how much is going to be done this month. The intro will easily be done, of course, that was always planned as the bare-minimum. As I'd mentioned before, I'd hoped to also get most or all of the prologue section playable for the first release. But that...I honestly don't know at this point. I suspect at least some of that section, which is essentially a 'getting to know the characters and setting' section, will make it into the release. I just don't have much idea yet how much of it will...