There's no fire in my belly. ;_;

I haven't made much progress on Tristy since the last blog and because my gam-mak drive will slow down when I start work again in February ( that is, assuming I cinch my interview tomorrow ), I need to get a cracking on. But I have been channeling my artsy side again to do a few more cutscenes for the game and try a different visual approach for the narrative ( I won't be re-doing anything though ).

I just wanted to get your guys opinion on a scene that looks like


this...



as opposed to one that looks like this. Previously, these scenes could only be accessed through the Scene Viewer.

Same scene, different approach. While the maps and other aesthetic details are nice to see, Tristy as a whole is meant to be a fairly dark game ( horrors of war, destruction of the human spirit, even incest 0_o ) and using those chibi sprites for major scenes makes it a tad difficult to take it seriously ( the actual drawn scenes are few and far in-between since I figured using them too many times would cause the novelty to wear off ).

For the other option, I'm not limited to how many expressions I can do for the full-body portraits, as seen below. Even though I can use face-sets, I just like using the portraits more. And I like the approach more, since the game is supposed to be a RPG/Visual-Novel hybrid.



The actual drawings themselves are supposed to be pretty dark as well ( hence no colour, just sepia-tinted images )



Other stuff:

From a gameplay point of view, both Darcy and Ianna can now become pretty capable fighters, since Ianna can use swords which uses her MAG stat, and Darcy's knives/daggers use her SPD stat. And I figured it would be good from a storyline point of view as to how Ianna grows as a character ( going from basic healer/light magic caster ) to badass spellsword.



The enemies in the above screen were hard before, until I threw a Flame Blade on Ianna. Her astronomical 52 MAG ( at level 17!!! ) destroyed these things with that sword. And with perfect timing as well, because the Ebony Strain hits Tristian again and her ATK, DEF, MAG and SPD stats plummet by 8 points. In a game where low numbers rule, this is devastating. Poor Lance is still below average though, until he promotes ( then again, the guy will probably still be outclassed by Tristian ).

As for everything else, still testing. >< So no real new content to show yet, apart from some small maps that have been added to existing areas.

So that's it for now. =)