My goodness, would you look at that? It's already the middle of October! Well, I don't have much to report this time around. As I predicted, the first case has not been finished yet. School picked up, and I've found myself busy for entire days recently, with no time to work on Danganronpa Team. It looks like that's unlikely to let up soon, either, as I have three exams in the upcoming week. On top of that, I uh...couldn't contain my excitement and imported Persona 5. I just started playing it yesterday, and it's excellent so far! But of course, that's bad news for Danganronpa Team's progress. Given how much of a Persona fanboy I am, my free time is going to be just about nothing but Persona for a while. Persona and school. I guess those two do go together like bread and butter.

That all said, I will try to pry myself away from Persona 5 to get some work done on Danganronpa Team (when I'm not otherwise busy with school). Who knows how well that'll work out, though? I will promise one thing, however. I don't usually like to make promises when it comes to game development, but I kind of feel like I need to. I don't like to break promises, so this is going to be a deadline I'm going to meet. Even if I have to kill myself to meet it. (And let's be honest, tearing myself away from Persona 5 for an extended period of time would be equivalent to killing myself.)

I will have the first case's investigation finished by the end of October. The first case as a whole will be finished by mid-November.

There. How's that? I think this is plenty doable. I don't have anything too pressing for a little while after this upcoming week. I have a project due on November 15th for a class, but other than that I don't think I'll have any other exams or things to worry about. So I should have a pretty good amount of free time on my hands. I'll use that time to (finally) finish the first chapter of the game!

Moving on from that deadline business, I will say that I have finished the graphics that I mentioned in the previous blog post. So let's take a look at them and talk about them a little bit!



So this is the one that we saw last time, which will be used for when the prosecution team is presenting their argument. I believe I mentioned last time that I wanted something that was stylish and popped. So I decided to put those 3D stars in to give the graphic some depth. And then I thought all the little stars in the trail of the 3D stars would add some additional style to it.



This graphic is my personal favorite. This will be used for when you give your rebuttal to the prosecution's argument (which is essentially the same thing as cross-examining a witness's testimony, only your arguing against the prosecution directly). This graphic took multiple attempts to make. I wanted to do something with lightning bolts, but it wasn't working out quite the way that I wanted it to, so I had to come back to it another day and do it from scratch. This is the result of that second attempt. While the lightning bolt effect is cool, I think my favorite part of this is the text. Everything I do in the graphics for this game I do by hand, and I think the text in this graphic in particular looks really cool.



This graphic is a bit odd. Obviously, this is the graphic that will be used when a witness is about to present testimony. I originally planned on doing a sort of spiral pattern within the squares that the words 'Witness' and 'Testimony' are written on, but I ended up just doing a bunch of weird patterns instead. It looks really strange. I added a little person at the bottom of the graphic because I thought the graphic looked a little barebones with just the squares with the funky patterns. So I put that in there to jazz the graphic up a bit.



Even stranger is how this final graphic turned out. The idea for this one is that, keeping in with the Danganronpa theme, two blood-covered bullets (truth bullets) will fly across the screen. They're not pictured because they'll be off-screen by the end of the animation. What we see here is the final frame of the animation, where "Cross Examination" is written on the smoke trails of the two bullets (which are also covered in blood because why not). I think the effect I have going on with the "Cross Examination" words looks really cool. I think it looks kind of like actual blood (which contrasts with the stylish hot pink Danganronpa blood). But when I showed this to a friend, they said they thought it looks not like blood, but like fire. That works too! Have a fire in your eyes and get fired up for the cross examination! Both interpretations work in my book!

So that's what I've got to share for this progress report. The next report will be at the end of the month, which is where I had better say that I finished the investigation of case one. If I don't, I'll...I'll uh...throw my copy of Persona 5 in the trash! oh god what am I saying please don't So let's all pray that I keep my word. Myself included. Haha...ha...oh god...