Pearly Salon Devblog #6 : Scaling down but punch up

Pearly Salon's Present and Future

Its been many months since the last dev blog I did, coz I was kinda in a combination of art burnout + day job priorities + real life distractions.

But its not that I'm completely idle like some doomer doing nothing but doomscrolling, the thoughts about Pearly Salon's development never left my mind.

However, with all the neat ideas I wanted for it, its still an RPGmaker project and a LOT of ideas I wish I could put into it will be extremely difficult to "program" and probably a logistic nightmare.

So I i have to be realistic and keep the scope in check, maybe even reduce or cut some of the planned features outside of the salon activities.

However, over the months I have been learning Unity, in the hopes I could make a more mechanically complex game while also enriching my game development skills, its time for me to move on from just using RPGmaker after (I wisll still make some games with that engine tho).

For now I barely know how to navigate the engine and do simple animations, or maybe use some kinda gamekit... or if I could work with someone knowledgeable in Unity.

Unity Animation test

Either way, any Unity based game wont be started until I at least master it in some degree.

So as of now, Pearly Salon is still being developed in RPGmaker MZ with the main plans still in progress, mostly with making the assets and implementing them.

I am also redoing some of the hair assets to differentiate between certain hairtypes so they dont look too similar.

Originally this is the "rough" hair type in my file, but looks too straight, so

this is the now updated rough hair, which where the straightener can be applied.

(or mess it up instead in some ways)

Also hey, NurAin as a client.

Between reworking and rendering the graphical assets, I've been revising the eventing and scripting, thinking about optimization and also for logistics reasons, so hopefully I figure out the best way to make a new demo without too much migraines.

Other Games

Like I said earlier, while I am learning Unity, I plan to make smaller scale games as part of the content cycle, something that isnt as feature rich as Pearly Salon but enough to illustrate certain ideas.

These will be short games but with plenty content, prolly works like a more gamey imagesets. Expect either of these may come out as demos before Pearly Salon's next expanded demo.

Concept artworks above are not final, and it should not be more mechanically complex than current's Pearly Salon (but probably more depth than SpyBreak)

Anyways, thanks for your longing support and I hope to update again very soon with some new stuffs.