Left Hand Magic - Menu

First off, don't forget that there is only a day left in these ongoing polls: Left Hand Magic Protagonist, October Short Story and October Comic. Make sure to get your votes in if you haven't!

With that reminder taken care of, I'll talk a bit about what I've been doing with Left Hand Magic. The image you see attached to the post is, after some post processing most likely, going to be the Main Menu image for the game. That might not seem like an important step, but I choose to take care of it over the last two days because:

A) I want the game to look professional from the start, as much as possible, which means custom menus and such. None of the super rough menu's Chastity Quest had at the start.

B) I needed to make the location one way or the other, since the exterior/entrance of the building (minus the characters) is going to one of the shots in the game's intro.

C) This is probably the most important! It forced me to actually finalize all of the character's designs, as well as their work outfits. What you see here is their final form, though all of them will have different 'street clothes' outfits as well. Three out of four of them even have their names sorted out...I'm still trying to decide between several possibilities for the last character.

D) GUI alterations in Renpy require a fairly broad knowledge of how the engine works. So taking care of them at the outset will be a good way to blow the rust off my knowledge of the engine. It's not hard stuff, just stuff that requires a solid knowledge of how the engine's core systems work. This made it an extra-good place to start off at. 

So, there you go. It might not seem like much, you I actually probably but about 12 hours in over the last two days, plus several hours of render times, into working out all the steps needed. And I'm fairly happy with the result. I still have to actually get it attached to the game and work on the GUI stuff. 

One additional note that's cautiously positive. I sat down in the last few days and mapped out a rough schedule. I think I will be able to get through most or all of the Prologue content in addition to the Intro this month. If that happens, than there will be a solid introduction to each character, plus at least a small bit of H-content for each one. Nothing major, don't expect any proper sex scenes beyond a masturbation option for the MC (which was always part of the plan and should be fully animated). This is a proper visual novel, so their will be some buildup. But there will be at least some H-images and such for each girl. At least, assuming that I really can hit the goals I've outline. Which is still uncertain, as I haven't had a chance to really get a feel for this game's time requirements for each step yet.