Update #37 Behind the scene

Marvelous, you've arrived! And just on time. Now, let me take you into the engine room.

If you paid close attention in the scene above, you might've noticed that what should be a shadowy outline actually extends beyond the thin white clothy layer, and also shows on the woody bits. That's because I could not find any screen like that which was in any way transparent.

This is what the scene would've looked like.

Pretty boring, and not at all what I had envisioned. So what's a poor game dev to do? Put in a shit ton of effort to create my own transparent props? 

...

Haha, no.

What I did was just copy the characters, move them to the other side of the screen, put a spotlight behind them and increase the FOV of the camera so that I could get the entire picture without the evil twins showing. 

Voilà!

In retrospect I found another screen that didn't have the woody bits that maybe would've looked better. Not sure. But I might try using that one in the future.

As for this week I've been brainstorming episode 5, put out a couple of 4k renders, and overhauled the main menu plus some other GUI stuff. Actually the main menu and the GUI stuff took most of my time, I'm not very good at that.

When designing the new main menu I first looked at the main menus of some of my personal favorite Ren'Py games for inspiration. Then, through the power of my artistic abilities, created a prototype.

Behold!

Yes, I actually used that as my reference when making the main menu.

I don't know how readable the image is, but the plan was to have a few different images to change between, with a bit of zooming in and out for some added motion. The code itself turned out to be a lot easier to figure out than I thought it would, and I'm actually pretty pleased with the result.

Here's what it looks like:

The gif is too short, but there's six images total. A few minutes after this update drops I should've updated the links to episode 4 with the fancier main menu, in case you would like to check it out. Otherwise you'll see it once episode 5 drops.

For next week I'll keep brainstorming, outlining, and should probably get to the point where I start on the script proper. Also, as hinted at the end of the chapter, the character we're designing through polls is the MC's mom. So polls for that will start appearing soon. I'm going to have you vote for her race, which means that the MC may or may not be half-human. Might explain his looks if it turns out she's a goblin. Might make it even weirder if it turns out she's an elf.

That's all I had for you today. Quite a bit more than usual, will I even have anything to talk about next week now? Oh well, that's a problem for future Gary.

Thank you very much for your support, and have a marvelous week!