Proof of Life #119: It's progress report #7, baby!

Heya everyone, how are you doing? No surprise in this post, I'll mostly announce what I've been up to this past week, and add a few personal thoughts in the mix.

HC3's Story: Not much actual progress. None at all actually, but I'm almost finished with the maps, which means I'll soon be able to seriously start with the story. With HC2, I had a mental draft in my head with one possible ending, and I went ahead with that, improvising lots of it along the way. This time, I've written a rough script with some major milestones in the story, but it's not quite finished yet (writing a good story that would make sense over the span of several hours of gameplay is a lot harder than one might think^^). So after the maps, I'll force myself to sit down for 2-3 days and come up with more script ideas.

HC3's Map: I couldn't work on them as much as I'd hoped. This was mostly due to a bad headache that lasted for around 2 days straight, and sitting in front of a screen proved a lot harder that usual. I still managed to squeeze in some work anyway. The rest of the week went as usual.

The inn/tavern  is now entirely done (example guest room in upper left corner), and so is the casern(upper right and lower left corners). Now, all that remains is the sister's and the MC's house, and the antagonist's manor's interior. Then, I'll make any new maps I would need as I progress with the story.

HC3's Art: Talking about antagonists, you can see one of them in the lower right corner, the one with the hat and the moustache. I thought you guys might be bored of seeing only maps, so I added some sprites as well. There's the antagonist, a sleeping sprite of the childhood friend (for the prologue of the story), as well as some variations of the female characters: 

- the princess has two sides to her: the noble and elegant princess, and the one who enjoys spending time with her friends away from the castle, not afraid to get dirty if needs be. For that, she will have two different outfits and haircuts: the princess version (as you can see in the sprites, nothing new), and the "friend" version (ponytail haircut, casual outfit that should be ready tomorrow). 

-the sister/female captain of the city guard: she will have a casual outfit and haircut (the one on the right), but also a loose hair version, and a city guard version, with a personal stylized armor(also ready by tomorrow) and a bun haircut.

Since the antagonist varies from the usual muscular antagonist from HC1 and HC2 in terms of bodytype, I'm having one artist redo the sex animations with a different nude model for the male. I don't want it to be obese or disgusting, but not a typical bodybuilder either.

HC3's Gameplay: One thing: I'll try to have a save/load system that can be accessed directly in-game. not much, but it beats having to quit the game every time you wish to load another save.

That's it for this week! I'm sorry for those that feel like progress is slow. I swear I'm doing my best, but I've never put so much work into the visuals for a game. Every single map is entirely made in an image editing software, only making the base from RPGM's map editor (walls and roofs, which are then also edited afterwards). Sure, most items are standard or custom assets copy-pasted onto the map, but finding the right asset, matching the colors, creating the right layout, making sure everything works in each map, etc... means that even the smaller maps take a few hours to make. For example, I took half an hour last week changing the colors of the bottles on a shelf one by one so it would look like the tavern is selling several different types of alcohol^^

After all, the more time it takes, the better the game in the long run! So I hope you'll be patient with me.

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful week!

N_Taii

Edit: I reuploaded the sprites as a standalone file, because you couldn't see much in the first picture.