My course schedule's not very hectic right now, so I've been getting a lot of little things done. What a coincidence that my internet connection dropped on the same day of the website blackouts! It was down all day, and it just came back up during the night. Since I couldn't visit my usual timewasters, I've been tackling two extremely old, badly evented cutscenes which were way overdue for a revamp.

Back when I started this project a few years ago, I had the crazy idea of making one of the first scenes in the game consist of a large group of people moving to form a crowd. The scene worked for the old tile-based map, but trying to figure out how to resync all their movements for a new parallax map (with different dimensions) was a nightmare. So that was completely trashed. Now when the scene pictured below occurs, the crowd just stands there and makes noises. Emotion bubbles pop up to lead the player's eye toward a speaker. Unfortunately, it lags on my computer (~26 FPS), what with the fog and weather being processed with all those people events onscreen. Hopefully it won't be so slow for those of you with fancy gaming 'puters. :p



The next cutscene was evented pretty inefficiently, too. I didn't really "get" variables when I started out, so I used switches for every little thing that changed in a cutscene. The old version used six switches and multiple event pages. The cleaned up version now uses one variable which activates the whole scene. (hooray!) The annoying part is finding which of the old switches can be safely removed afterward, haha. Here's a preview of what's coming up next:



This scene's dialogue and battle are pretty much finished, but I need to go back and do some more testing to make sure that some post-scene stuff works properly.

That's about it for major progress. As for the small things:
* Menu icons changed
* BEM spritesets for Moshi and Leiko are complete
* "Materials" have new icons
* "Affection" has been added to the menu, but hasn't been implemented yet
* Finished the animation for Pulse Trigger, one of Leiko's Purge skills. (a big-ass laser of light!)