January Update #1

Progress over the last week or so has been swift! We're rapidly passing out of prototyping and moving into Alpha, so pretty soon there'll be some seriously impressive stuff to show off!

Most of our time thus far has been dedicated to laying groundwork, and the extra effort has been seriously paying off.

Animation

For one, the basic framework for the Global Animation System has been implemented! This underlying system will handle moving character sprites in and out of frame, as well as some of the squash and stretch, or any other animation that moves or warps the entire sprite!

Ignore the delay in the animation and the placeholder art. Polish comes later.

Likewise, there've been some early tests of the Local Animation System, which will handle all character animation that doesn't move the sprite. Pictured below are the first two tests we did using an asset call "Boing Kit" which implements automated momentum an certain parts of the character sprites.

We started by attaching one to this Isabelle Sprite's neck to make her head bobble. Good start...

Then we tooled around with the settings a bit, and threw together a small test animation. This is extremely promising!

Her eyes and neck are controlled by Unity's normal animation system, while her ears and hair are fully procedural. 

This could apply to tails, clothes, and pretty much anything else that has secondary motion of some kind. It's likely that using this Asset, we'll be able make fairly polished animations VERY quickly if we combine it with more traditional techniques.

Dialogue System and GUI

The underlying code of implementing the dialogue system and GUI are nearly complete, and text scrolling is basically functional!

The final interface will naturally be WAY more polished than this, but it's important to make sure everything works before adding flashy extras.

The system can now also accept an arbitrary number of options and tell which one the player picked, so dialogue trees now work!

This is set up in such a way that it'll be easy to completely replace the front-end on this, and send commands to other systems right from the dialogue editor. On a practical level, this means that most of the actual important code for running the game is DONE. 

Card Game

The main part the underlying framework for "Dragon Dares: Nude Leaf" that remains incomplete is the actual Card Game, though we're making VERY swift progress on it. 

Most of the code for calculating whether cards match, how many clothes the characters have, and their current mood are done though!

It doesn't look like much now, but this forms the basis of what'll be the actual strip game! We're hoping to knock out the rest of the code for the actual card game in the next few days, at which point we're (hopefully) on to writing and asset production!

Additionally, our card artist, Choo, has been making a lot of good progress, and we hope to be able to show some of that off in the next development update!

Until then, thanks for all of your support on this project! You'll hear from us again soon!