Update - Shizu in the dark

tl;dr - I've been programming PAT and re-rendering pictures for the PAL ending on a week in which I've felt bored and crappy!

This week's image

Ooh, isn't it all spooky and dark and blue tinted? I wonder why that is.

Or rather, I know why that is, since I made the picture like this deliberately, but I'm hoping you're wondering why it's like that. So basically, I lied.

Doesn't she look cute, though?

Actually, I would like to know whether this kind of presentation seems okay - I have this idea for the opening titles to present some stuff this way, with the black backgrounds. It's actually for a specific reason that I hope you'll understand when you play the game, but I guess it's also kind of a nod to PAC. I just don't want the early parts of the game to seem cheap, is all.

Timelapse programming

Honestly, I had kind of a crappy week. I've been trying to knuckle down and do more work, but I've failed to be as productive as I've wanted. I suspect that's partly because a lot of what I have to do at this point (the PAT programming) requires me to learn this new system and while that's relatively easy, it's not something I'm comfortable with yet, so it's hard to motivate myself to do it. I've felt bored and listless and that makes me anxious, so I haven't really been having a good time this week, but I think maybe I'm getting back on track now.

Anyway, I've started programming new sections of PAT for the demo release. I've got a lot of the images done already - most of what I need for day 1, really - and a fair amount of the writing, too. I need to put it all together, though, and fill in the gaps in what I've written. Building the game in this way calls for more writing and images as I go through it, so I've been doing some of that too, of course.

This programming in Visual Novel Maker does take a little longer than I'd like - longer than working in Adrift. Partly that's because I've been using Adrift since I was just out of high school, but also because it is just a less efficient process; I have to go in and for every new separate line I have to create a "show message" task then paste in the text I've written. That's not by itself a big deal, but it adds up over a lot of text.

All told I'm mostly happy with this process so far, but there's some stuff that's not working like I want it to and I don't yet know why, so that's not ideal. I also really hope that the game file isn't going to become a nightmare to manage once it becomes a large project. We'll see.

PAL re-renders

I've been redoing some pictures, as I mentioned in my public post, for PAL. I have a weird feeling like I could kind of do that process forever in cycles; by the time I get to the end of redoing the pictures I've got good enough that the first ones I re-rendered now look noticeably inferior to the recent ones and I have to go back and fix those again. Like bridge painters who take so long painting a giant bridge they just have to start at the beginning again as soon as they complete it.

Anyway, in this case I just intend to fix up some glaringly poor examples before the 2.0 release and I did a full sweep of Iku's solo ending pictures for that purpose. I'm also in the midst of re-rendering Kimiko and Masami's solo ending pictures for better lighting, plus I should probably do Rio's as well.

I've also got a little Masami + tentacles bonus to throw into the victory suite when I put out the v2.0 release.

Anything to say to all that? Have you even read this far or did you just look at the picture and leave? Let me know in the comments!