Pixel Gallery for The Hunter 2

Hello everyone,

It's time to come back to The Hunter 2 for a bit.

I won't hide that I'm shoehorning a bit more than I originally planned ("a bit more" being sarcastic.) Because among the things we're adding in this update, we've created a complete pixel gallery. Did that delay the rest? Completely. Hime cursed me for several generations due to how RPG Maker handles that stuff poorly and she had to spend a lot of time on it. It's not COMPLETELY finished as there's one last thing to fix but it's 95% ready. Let me show you.

I tried to make it as complete as possible. Don't mind the "background" on the bottom. It's actually the 5% left to do. So what do we have?

First of all, you choose your character, then the animation. And then, you can customize the animation based on what you want to see. With or without clothes (of course when only one version is available, switching to the other won't change anything.) The size (that's one of things that was the hardest to do for Hime as making a sprite bigger is not made with integers in MV so it's blurry as fuck. She had to use special tricks (and she had to find them first :x).

Then you can choose the speed. That's the easy part to code. And finally, the liquids. That also is nothing to struggle at. Lastly, when it will be implemented, you'll be able to chose a background that will appear behind the animation. There will be two types of backgrounds. Map backgrounds like this one:

Those are for a better contextualization, it allows you to create a "scene". The downside is that you're kinda "locked" at x1 size if you want it to work. Well, you can make it bigger anyway, but it'll probably look strange.

The other backgrounds will be stuff like the current RPG Maker battle backgrounds. I won't have the time to find/create specific ones so you'll be left with some of those to show bigger versions of the animation.

As a little extra to celebrate this gallery, All animations from the 1st game will be implemented in a specific category :)

Now comes the less fun part. Since we've just finished the gallery, now I have to do the whole "filling" part. Meaning I have to add all the animations to the gallery. I'm not even detailing the process of importing the animations (that's done for TH2 but I have to it for all the animations of the first game), but writing down the json file will take some time. It's a spreadsheet in which I have to fill the character name, then the name of the animations, then for each animation I have to link the ID to each possibility (Clothes + Speed + Liquid) so basically 18 lines for each animation. It's not TERRIBLE, but it'll take some time. Especially considering that as you can see in the Character/Animation spot, I have to create a specific head so I have to take the charset, cut it, enlarge it, draw an outline, then save it. It's a bit quicker for the animation since there's no cutting/resizing implied but that takes some time.

Why am I mentioning all this? First so you can understand that sometimes things take more time than they look. And secondly, to prepare you mentally about something less pleasing to hear.

We are not going to make it for Christmas for the brothel. There are different reasons for this that I'll detail in the next brothel post (which should be the next one.) Among them is the time that is going to be needed to fill the datas for the json. It'll take A LOT of time.

The reason I'm mentioning it right now is because I'm actually wondering. There are two possibilities: either releasing the next update WITHOUT the brothel for Christmas or wait until it's finished.

The main problem I have with the first option is that when the brothel will be implemented you'll have to start a new game anyway. And it's already something mandatory in the current state of things (brothel excluded.) We've made so many changes that starting a new game is mandatory. Even I will have to do so for my testing sessions. So I hardly believe you're ready to start a new game for two updates in a row (especially considering that even if you're speedrunning the game, it takes an hour or two to get to the end. But I'd rather you telling me what you prefer. I'll abide to the choice of the majority.

https://strawpoll.com/polls/xVg7d4BVzZr

Exceptionally, I do have some content to make you wait, though. I still have stuff to show you about TH2, I have the two remaining SoV3 posts I've planned, and I can also release the full-size CGs of SoV3 (dunno if they're still available or not) for lower tiers. Let say that in terms of content, I do have enough so that you won't feel abandonned until I'm releasing the next TH2 update :p

That's all for today. I'll wait for you answers!

See ya o/