(5/28/18) Day 6 and Planning Ahead

Hey everybody. I'm posting early because I probably won't have any new progress to show off tonight. Half of that reason is because this next step is taking a lot of work before it can get into the game, and the other half is because I spent most of the day helping my brother and his girlfriend moving furniture and cleaning around our apartment. 

With the expressions I was working on, I had some trouble thinking about how I was going to organize them. I've decided that I'm going to have the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth each be a separate image that I can change, so expressions can be mixed and matched. This method should save memory from loading images as well as give me the maximum control over the emotions of the player. I probably won't use this system with NPC characters, since they typically don't need the same emotion range as the player, but that might change in the future. I'll probably finish the male characters expressions and test them in the game tonight, so I'll see how much trouble it would be to do that with the other major NPCs.

I also wanted to take this less busy post as a chance to offer a poll. This poll is related to the upcoming demo I have planned. For those out of the loop, I've been working toward having a demo version of the new system I plan on using out sometime soon (2-3 weeks from now). This demo will have nearly all of the features I plan to have in the latest version of SQII, but will take place in Maria's house from SQI, with new and remastered content from that game adapted to fit this new system. However, since this work on the updated designs of the old characters would go to waste if I left it at that, I was also going to create an expanded version of the first town from SQI, both as additional content that could be provided more quickly by me, and as a test to see how much time it takes for me to make a town-sized update after the new system has been completed with multiple important NPCs. 

Now for the content of the actual poll. The jump from my expected demo to the minigame-remaster of Spanquest I (which from now on will be called Spanquest I/2) is a pretty big one. One that would add at least another 3-4 weeks of development from my current predictions. I would like to ask my patrons whether or not they would accept the demo I have planned for release in 2-3 weeks as a paid update, along with the finished version of Spanquest I/2 which would come roughly a month after. While the amount of content alone would be small compared to the size of updates I have planned from then on, the demo would represent the completion of the development of my new system, and a conclusion to the core developmental phase of the game where I can stop working on the main systems of the game and return to the creative work of making new scenes, characters, and interactions. 

It's been over a year in the making, but I plan on drawing this to a close soon enough.