Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

It's vacation time! Well, from my day job, anyway. And that means more time to work on Supermodel, though I try to get some relaxation between the bouts of frantic coding.

Since last week, I have created and rendered all the images for Seraphim's photo shoot and put them in the game. But that pales compared to the importance of what I have spent my time on since then: the menus!

Yes, menus. That probably doesn't sound exciting to any of you, but it is vitally important that these menus look and feel good. These particular menus are the ones you will see as soon as you click Start on the main menu. First, you are presented with a choice of models to photograph (Vanguard and Seraphim in this version, more later). Once selected, you get to choose a scenario, a difficulty level, and a deck, in that order. Finally, these choices are considered before setting up the card match itself. 

This menu is slick and fully animated, with buttons sliding in and out all over the place, never taking so long as to get in the way of your desire to quickly get to the game. I wanted this menu to look and feel as good as possible while being intuitive. In fact, there isn't a single part of this menu that explains what you need to do or why; it expects you to understand just by looking at it. And I think you will.

One of the reasons I put so much effort into this menu is that it will be reused for the full Supermodel later. This is the primary way you will interact with the game, and you return to it between each story chapter and card game match. From here, you choose a character you wish to focus on, then pick one of their unlocked story chapters or matches to play. I will get into more detail about this in a later update, but for now, rest assured that this menu will have a lasting impact on Supermodel.

Next up on my list is the menu for selecting which deck to edit/create in the deck builder. Until now, it has been just a standard Ren'py dialogue menu, and that's just not good enough. Luckily, I can reuse the abovementioned menu for this, so I don't expect this to take more than a few hours of work. After that, I will tackle a somewhat more complicated menu: The booster pack purchase screen. 

This screen allows you to purchase booster packs with random cards using any compensation points you may have earned throughout the game (NEVER using real money). A couple of finicky interactions on this screen, including the concept of compensation points in the first place, make it slightly tricky to code. Still, it should be nowhere near as bad as the main menu I just finished, so I'm not exactly worried.

Unless I forget something, that should then be the end of the new menus in Snapshot 2.0, and it should also put me very, very close to wrapping up this update so that I can get it in your hands. I'm increasingly hopeful I can do this before July ends, though it might come down to the wire. There are some things I would have liked to put some more effort into, especially on the music front, but I've got to get something out the door soon before I lose all my backers.

Yeah, the number of people supporting me has been roughly halved since last year, so this early stage of Supermodel development has been rough economically. Of course, there are many potential reasons for that. I always knew I would take a hit from creating something brand new with Supermodel and spending so much time getting the card mechanics right before working on the story. Still, it sucks to see such a dropoff. It also means that I'm doubly grateful to all of you who read this because that means you've supported me during this period. So thank you.

But now I need to spend a few hours playing games or something. I've been hammering away on these menus since I woke up this morning, and it's past dinnertime now... during my "vacation."

Until next time!