#mini devlog

We've managed to get all of the volunteers needed for the CG art and concept art for WRBC! I'm very excited to see how things progress moving forward!

On that end, I've begun moving the script from my writing doc to code, and I've managed to get through Scene 3 (adding in music code, ZH sprite code, and CG codes). I've also got the codex system up and running (mercifully the creator of the GUI template WRBC uses also made the codex template, so they were easy enough to merge).

I'm really happy with the progress thus far!

I won't be doing much tomorrow though, as I grow a year older and will be dragged around by my family for the day lol

Mini Devlog - #14

Ok.... so implementing irregularly shaped health/stat bars is.... something... Basically, this required some shader and texture magic to properly pull off.

In the current implementation, there's 3 (well actually 4... MAYBE 5?) layers to the health bar:

A background

A fill for the health (there's two of these, one for the health value, and another that lingers when the player gets damaged)

A frame (sits on top of the health fill)

There's also a "cutoff" mask, which we use along with a shader to determine how much of the bar to "show". It's a gradient!

The shader I'm using (thanks Cocefi) has a cutoff property (0 to 1), and basically utilizes the above texture to gradually mask/clip the fill texture underneath the mask.

Another tricky part was actually making the gradient, which I was able to do thanks to a feature in Adobe Illustrator called Freeform Gradient

This allowed me to define points in my shape where certain colors should be in the gradient. And of course, the end result is in the video!

Now that I've got that figured out, I'm probably going to test out some other directions for the Healthbar and the other gauge:

I'm slowly putting together a Player's Guide for Sacrarium Pario.

The goal is to provide an Endings Guide that also explains how the system works to make it easier to navigate getting each of the 23 endings (15 Dead Ends, 8 full ends).

me: the fuck?

*gets a fever*

me : oh i've had a fucking cold no wonder i want to crawl into a ball.

So in good news, WRBC has through scene 11 written, and I'm one 14th of the way through scene 12. Alas, I am not through scene 14 like I wanted though, because sept has mostly been me trying to reset after the hell that is summer.

Okay! The common route for The Woeful Rose & The Bitter Crow has officially gotten its first draft done!

I'm going to scan it one more time for coherency and have a buddy of mine also read it before moving forward into the routes of our dear old men.

Pario assets are still in development atm, but I promise to keep things updated as they come in. Some old tentative "Maybe/What If" CGs have officially gotten cut, but that is partly because I realized I coded the gallery without them in mind and I'm not redoing that again (besides Rian has 8+ CGs to still draw without them).

I might now start reaching out to people (CG artists, editors, beta readers, etc) for WRBC. I also need to flip a quarter to see which old man I write about first.

This is just the first chunk of the post-it note level of the outline.

Each of those fucking light gray boxes has two choice menus with three activities that then lead to different conversations that will also probably have affection-altering conversations.

Necare your game was supposed to be easy.

BUT

I only have five snippets to write tomorrow to finish it up. All of the first portion of this scene is done. I've also compiled a list of the possible CGs for our lovely artist. I only have two dead ends to write out and the scenes that lead to the Antagonism route to finish + rewriting one of the scenes in scene 8 after getting some feedback from Rian.

I hope to get them done tomorrow, but I can't finish them tonight. I have to wake up at 5 tomorrow morning for work. So I gotta go to bed.