Structuring

What’s been done?

BenX

• Dev tool 2.0 - on the spot editing

Ecchi Sensei

• Optimization

Apologies for not having a render this time, I usually create them on the day of the post.. But I’m not feeling too well, basically, the moment I leave my bed I feel like I could throw up at any minute =<. So I’m writing this post on my laptop, which doesn’t have HS, nor do I think it would be able to run it xD

Now, why is the list so short? Well, I was off to a bad start the first week. Had trouble getting the gears going and lost a lot of time to, well.. I dunno.. Time just flew by.. It’s an exciting time for PC hardware and I’ve been buying some new parts, which.. Comes with a lot of research.. And I guess I underestimated how long it would take, cause before I knew it, hours would have passed.. Combine that with me still trying to get my old groove back and you get one worthless week =D.. Though my PC will be a render beast when my 5900X arrives, my 3080 already arrived (and killed my PC a few times cause my PSU can’t keep up) and I got a bigger monitor as well. I went from 27” 4k60hz to 34” 1440p144hz ultra wide, a lot more screen space and the higher refresh is certainly nice. It sucks that I had to step down from 4k, but apparently they don’t make affordable 4k high refresh rate monitors bigger than 27” =<

I did get some work done in that week though and I’ve slowly been getting my groove back. The week that followed (Last week) was a lot better already but even though I’m working more, I feel like I’m not at the speed I was before.. Or maybe I’m just overestimating some things? I dunno.. But yea, getting work done at least. And while the list might not look like much, it’s a bit deceiving. For the dev tool, there’s a lot of research and trial and error involved. As I’m doing some pretty crazy shit. As for Ecchi Sensei, I say “optimization”, but basically I’m redoing a lot of the GUI and features. More on that below though, first some BenX! ;)

BenX
After having a little chat with Newman, we decided it might be better to upgrade the dev tools first, so it’s easier for him to add stuff and make changes himself. As it can be quite tedious for both of us to add and change stuff. Newman has to write everything down, find the right expression to match them, write those down. I then go over them with my conversion script and give it a second lookover to make sure it didn’t do anything weird, add dolls, backgrounds, menus and proper labels and stuff. With changes it isn’t always clear what Newman meant or I just can’t find the line in the script. This all causes a lot of back and forth and can take a lot of time. While it’s only the first step, I managed to make the dialog editable. You can click on the textbox to edit it and once you hit enter, it writes it down in the file for you.. Sadly though, this does trigger Renpy to reload, as it’s files got edited. Otherwise it would still show the old text :P

It was quite a challenge though, figuring out one what line the game currently is. Then I remembered that if you hit Shift+E when dev mode is on, you jump to that line of code. Took me a while to figure out what that command was but I got there in the end. Next up was the file editing though, which shouldn’t be too hard.. But Renpy handles files a bit differently.. And when trying to write into it I ended up with an empty file.. Luckily I backed that file up, but it did give me a little scare xD. But yea, now that I know how to find the current line and save the changes to the file, the remaining tasks should be a bit easier.. Hopefully.. xD

Ecchi Sensei
As I said before, I’m redoing most of the GUI/feature front end. A lot of them use imagemaps with text baked into it and also having an idle and hover version. This isn’t too bad for a world map or something, but for every page, this can add up fast and with the text being baked in, also means it can’t be translated (unless you make the full image again with the new text). So I’m recreating most of the GUI, splitting off elements from the PSD and reacting the background and placing all the text in the game itself. This is a long and tedious task, but it results in a smaller game and makes everything translatable =3.

What’s next?

BenX

• More Dev Tool 2.0
• Combat 2.0 (renamed the rework to 2.0)

Ecchi Sensei

• More optimization
• Maybe animation

Creative

• Blender
• Unity
• The usual stuff

So.. Yea.. Structure is slowly getting built up again. It’s not quite where I want it yet, but it’s something. Basically alternating days between BenX and Ecchi Sensei. I want to add some free days in as well, for Blender/Unity stuff.. But, since the first week went so shit, I didn’t want to waste time. Gonna try and find a better balance though, if I don’t wanna kill myself xD. Also need to fine a way to work faster.. As I’ve been a slow boy even when working =<

BenX
I will be adding expression changes to Dev Tool 2.0 next, which will be interesting because it means reading between the lines. I’ll need to read between 2 lines of dialog, except.. Sometimes there’s a label, cause you jumpers.. So.. Yea.. Not sure how to fix that yet, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out ^^.

Ecchi Sensei
Nothing exciting here, just more optimization. I’m almost done with the character info and will finish up the config screen after that.

Creative
I kinda wanna dive hard into Blender, since my PC is (almost) beefed up now.. Got some neat tutorials ready for toon shaders, but.. I also got some Unity tutorials for a Pokemon-like game.. I’m pretty excited for both, but haven’t really found the time to go through them =<

I’ll leave it at that.. Didn’t think I’d be writing such a long post.. But here we are.. See you in the next one!
A sickly Akanoes