In detail: massage scene & skip buttons

Hey everyone,

I hope you're all doing well :)  Here's a small update on what I've been doing!

Glueing things together

Well, for the last two weeks I've been putting together Lorza's story in the game-engine.

This job always consits out of three parts; implementing gameplay, writing dialog & building the scenes from individual images. Meanwhile I also  added  140 images to the game.

Now you probably won't  notice it while playing, but this shot for exampe consists out of 11 seperate images.

These are the 11 image in the shot above:

• A new background, now showing the massage charts.  
• A slight layer of fog, to push back the background when characters are in the room.  
• The bed. 
• The candle flames (they animate) 
• Lorza, head & body 
• Keen head & body 
• The girl on the bead, head & body (...she blinks in game) 
• The HUD

These images usually need to be positioned by hand & timed to the dialog. Now the real challenge here was make a good looking composition of these elements... which was often tricky because it's a pretty cramped scene.  

One of the things I always want to avoid when putting together these scenes, are so called 'tangents'. These  are lines 'that hit each other in a bothersome way'. You still see it happen below, where Lorza's ear touches Ninju's hair & a bit lower between Ninju's arm & Lorza her leg.  

Well...I see it. But maybe you were looking at something else? ;)

So it was quite the puzzle again, but a lot of fun to do!


Skip buttons -  in detail

Now, here's another image I wanted to share. It might not look like much, but I'm sure many of you will be happy to see this :)

With these buttons you can skip foreward to different chapters in the game!  

And this should avoid mandatory replays after a game-update (because code changes, break save games).

Soooo, why didn't I add these buttons sooner you might wonder?  Well, that is because it required a lot of manual input to make a button work.

You see, each time you do something in game -like, pick up an item- a trigger is switched.
Now to skip forward, I need to manually switch  all triggers you would normally pass when progressing through a storyline - till the new starting point.

And there are a lot of triggers in the game :)

For example; the button 'Start at Sophie'-button,  looks like this behind the scenes -->

Well here are only 84 lines shown here, but this list for Sophie actually ends at line 262 :)

So, doing this by hand wasn't really possible - it's quite error prone & I would also need to redo  it after each update (because  new triggers are constantly being  added to the game).

But now Rob (the new programmer I colaborate with) found a code-trick to quickly gather these trigger settings & put them into a list.  And this makes it finally possible to add these buttons.

So, thank you Rob!

A glimpse!

Well, I've actually worked on some more content. But since I don't want to spoil the surprise, I can't show too much.  However, here is a glimpse of a new scene that I just added to  the game, I wonder if you can guess what's going on here :)  

But, no worries. The next update is almost done, and then you can see everything for yourself! The last thing I still need to do, is make an extra  XXX scene for Lorza, to give the current update a nice conclusion.

I think the update should be ready before the end of the month... and perhaps even a bit sooner.

Well, that's all I have for now. I hope you enjoy the next update :)


All the best!

Robin