Studio Knockout

Hohoho, what’s this? Candid footage of Freyz and Sovy enjoying a dip in a local hot-tub! Complete with romantic night sky and animated bubbles, no less. But wait, you exclaim, isn’t Sovy the main villain of Puppy Love 4? And where did these shirtless sprites come from? 

Yes indeed, Sovy did win the highest ‘monster’ bid, making him the final boss. But he’s obviously not on duty here. Undressed sprites were created by Nai for many of the characters in PL4, and I’ve decided to have some fun with that.

Hey all,

there’s been a big break due to school-holidays cascading into a 2 week trip to Hawaii to visit Nai’s home island, which was great and awesome and fun, but now we’re home and getting everything set up again. 

I’ll be working on PL4 as normal at every opportunity, and Nai is trying to set up a whole bunch of updates to our various websites, which would be swell. 

This is a photo I took from Kalalau lookout near the end of our journey. Coming back from Hawaiian springtime into New Zealand winter was a rough transition. 

Hope you’re all well,

So uh, here’s what I made today.

Meme courtesy of this guy.

It was nice to play around with something graphical for a change. And as a side note, I figured out how to make character shadows overlap without darkening, which I probably shouldn’t have spent time on, but am super proud of.

Hey everyone! Long time no post.

School holidays are finally over, and that mean’s I’m back at the keyboard. This year baby is up to 3 days of playgroup a week, so I should be able to work even faster!

But progress is made once again! Here’s Yoshils the ogre, strutting his extra muscly, yellow stuff in the village. He’s the next monster to stand between our heroes and the end of the game.

Hey folks, time for a PL4 update,

Today and yesterday I put a little more time into the battle with the cyclops sisters. I implemented a big lightning-bolt attack for the electric-armed Su. The sprites for the lightning were commissioned from Felice. It took a bit of tweaking to get it to play out how I wanted, but I’m quite happy with the look. This gif plays it a bit fast due to low frame-rate, but that’s ok.

The other thing I ran into while testing this battle encounter was my first genuine game-over. I’d never had to deal with one before so the game just sulked, unable to progress. I needed a Game-Over Screen! So I made one fitting to the grim, serious nature of the Puppy Love franchise.

Hey folks!

Today and yesterday I’ve been working in the dark depths of Pumpernickel Cave with Suu and Zan the cyclops sisters. With shapeshifting and elemental powers, these characters have a lot of visual effects- so I’ve made an extra batch of GIFs to show them off! Spoilers ahoy!

Each one of Suu’s lightning arms can be summoned and dismissed individually, which makes for some striking effects. I’m very happy with how it looks. During the battle you’ll have to fight your way past a forest of arms that hurt to touch.

I also updated some battle animations, like Jemma’s ability to constrict her prey in her scaley coils. Then we see Zan using the full extent of her abilities to impersonate and replace party-members! How will our heroes prevail!?

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

We’ve moved on to the cave area, and the cyclops sisters Su and Zan, courtesy of users sable_p and mordwyl of FurAffinity, along with returning favorite Bane, who has been in every single Puppy Love game.

The two cyclops characters were submitted by their users with no knowledge of the other, a complete coincidence that we ended up with both. Still, they make a dynamic duo- of animation and programming challenges. Su’s arms are made of lightning, and she can summon a whole bunch. Zan is a shapeshifter, which was tricky to concept out and animate. I’m pretty happy with how both are working now, you might see more as I progress through their battle encounter.

Update time!

School holidays are over, so I’m back at the keyboard and plugging away. Just trying to power on through the story without trying to fix every little thing as I go. But will I stop to make sure the mailmain’s eyebrows have a smooth, sinewave wiggle? Absolutely.

It’s nice to be getting on after setting up the beginning for so long, getting to see more of the characters and locations in my own game. This is Edward Percy who belongs to Engine, a good friend of ours and a huge supporter of KO studio. It’s the first time Percy has been in a Puppy Love, but he’s tiny and perfect and I love him.

Hey everyone!

Some feel-good progress today, getting right into the forest area and the encounter with Kudi! (thefiddlecat on FA) I wanted to do some tricky things with character position in this segment, but in an astounding twist, nothing went terribly wrong, so here we are.

Kudi’s battle was the first one I experimented with when I started programming the battle system into GMS so now I get to pick up where I left and see if any of it still works. Kudi is a forest spirit so I’ve got some vines I want him to summon that appear as minor enemies. Hopefully we’ll see some of that with the next update.

Time for another update!

Is that a new background? Holy moly, it’s like I’m making progress. We’ve moved onto the world map and on to new areas like these spooky ruins, where poor furries need to be rescued from creepy curses. We get to see Deiser and Caleb for the first time, victims of whatever mysterious fate has befallen this town. It’s nice to be moving on through the story and seeing more of the cast. I really underestimated how much time I’d have to sink into functionalities like menus, the dialogue boxes and things. Today I made an autoplay mode that I could speed up to help me run through the game quickly, because even though I can save, if I change something big I might need to run the game through from the start just to check it all works properly.

Thanks for watching!

Hey, you’re right, this needs to go up in an FAQ:

Windows 10 doesn’t support Puppy Love 1!

I seem to be able to run PL2 & 3 on my Win10 machine, is anyone else having troubles with it?

Now PL1 was made in Novelty, which was pretty buggy to begin with, but it seems to have lost support entirely with Win10, and if it doesn’t run in compatibility mode then I’m not sure what to do.

Ideally I want to put PL1 back together in something like Game Maker, but that takes time I don’t have at the moment. I’ll check if Novelty has been updated, maybe make a new build-out of the game, but otherwise PL1 might have to come off the shelves.

Hey everyone,

Wow so the last few weeks have been a bit hectic and there always seemed to be something getting in the way of doing more Puppy Love. I did do some work on it though, like getting characters to have a nice outline when you mouseover them, so that you know you can click them if you want. That was surprisingly awkward to arrange, but it works now.

I’m pretty much onto chapter 2, but I wanted to clean up some things before I moved on, like fixing up the code for nice fade-to-black transitions. I’m pretty happy with the way it’s looking.

I’m not so happy with the way its sounding, but I’ve spent a lot of time on this website farming sound effects that I like. It’s kind of like the second-hand shopping of sound effects, where there’s some good stuff, but it’s hard to get specifically what you need. My brother-in-law sent me some stuff he made too, including a midi music track I really liked, but he’s super busy so how can I convince him to make more?

Hey everyone, it’s been a while!

So the last few weeks have been tax time and school holidays and other distractions, but this term our dear daughter is up to two days a week of playgroup so I’ll be getting more hours in the week to work on PL4!

Today I went into the studio where Nai is working on all new pages of the Galleon Comic, and fixed up a few things like making everyone blink at different times, the dialogue box not glitch when we zoom in, and getting some more sound effects into the game. I also managed to makeshift myself some outlined text that can be read against any background, which is nice.

I’ve bug-hunted my way through the first chapter and our team of misfits have made it to the overworld map. I’m looking forward to sinking my teeth into chapter two where we’ll be encountering the first of the monster characters.

Hey everyone,

Today I worked on the menu system some more, polishing it up for presentation. The help tutorials need some love, but it’s looking pretty good.