Hey, everyone! I figured since it's been about a month I oughta give an update on how things are progressing. Honestly, I'm a little behind where I'd like to be (thanks in part to getting addicted to The Evil Within/2) but I've gotten quite a bit of work done in the past month. So let's get into the details of that.

As I said in the last update, I've been editing all that's been made of the game thus far. Implementing different sprites for characters who only had one sprite beforehand, fixing general errors, making stylistical decisions (such as whether or not to use a comma before the word 'too') and ensuring those decisions are a constant throughout the entire game, and upholding other things that should remain constant (such as the honorifics Yukari uses for each character, nicknames characters have for each other, and so forth). That's all been going fairly well. The characters look way more alive and feel much more like real characters with the sprites I've added in. The script seems much more consistent than it did before. Things just in general look a lot better than they did.

Along with that, I did a HECK of a lot of graphical work to prepare for the rest of the game. I put in a bunch of stuff that only comes up in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Just so I don't have to do it later. That's not to say that all the graphics are done. Heck, no. In specific, I still need backgrounds for places that only crop up in chapters 3 and onward, which I'll get together when they come up (no rush there). There's also going to be a bunch of stuff specific to chapter 6 that I'll make as I'm making chapter 6, since it's a little... special.

I've also been getting together a bunch of songs I'm going to use later in the game. That's all done (post-game stuff aside).

That's not all I did. I redid a whole bunch of stuff that was already 'done'. In addition to adding new sprites for existing characters, I cleaned up the sprites on other characters who only have one sprite. I also did a complete re-haul of most of the trial animations. I completely redid the rebuttal, witness testimony, and cross-examination animations. I tweaked the objection, hold it, and take that animations. And I made the showdown animations actual animations with some movement to them (before they were just a still image, now they're comprised of like eleven frames of animation).

The biggest re-haul I did was the evidence selection. Before, I had it so that you could only see the current truth bullet you had selected and you only had one option in regards to changing it. You could cycle to the next bullet in the list. You couldn't see all the bullets you had at once. You had to sift through them one-by-one to find the one you needed. Needless to say, this was really clunky and wasted a lot of the player's time. Now, changing truth bullets looks something more like this:


Note: The names of the pieces of evidence shown here have been censored since I was too lazy to make dummy names for the purposes of this screenshot.

As you can see, you've got that nice little star trail behind the bullet currently selected, along with a glowing outline around the bullet. And you can select bullets in either direction. Up or down. There are a whole bunch of animations associated with this new system of changing evidence, and it turned out looking really cool. It was a pain in the butt to make, though (at one point I was calculating tons of x and y coordinates to make the differences between each frame of animation even).

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!

In trials, I originally gave you four options after the prosecution or whoever gives a statement in the following order: Object, Press a Statement, Cycle (Change) Evidence, Next Statement. That's all fine and dandy, but one of my beta testers pointed out that it's not a good idea to have Objecting be the first option, since if your finger slips you're suddenly stuck with a penalty. So I switched the ordering so that Cycle Evidence is first and Object is the third option. That way, even if you accidentally hit the first option, it won't take long at all to get back to where you want to be.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

In addition to everything I just said, one of my beta testers once complained that I didn't explain in-game about where to find your health. Before, you had to open the menu in order to look at your health, which makes sense, but... it always bugged me. I always wanted to put some sort of visual representation of your health right there front and center without having to open the menu, but I thought that doing so would clutter up the HUD. And I didn't want to make unnecessary clutter. Well, I thought good and hard about it, and I realized there's a part of the HUD that just sits there. Something that's just for show.

Not anymore.



You see that revolver chamber next to the bullet at the top right of the screen? The one that's crumbling away? That's the new visual representation of your health. As you get penalized, the revolver chamber will lose the rings surrounding it, lose its color, crack, and fall apart. In that order. With this, you don't have to look at the menu anymore to get a general idea of where your health is at. Of course, if you want an exact value, you can still check it on the menu. Now no part of the HUD is just there for show and it's easier than ever to tell how close you are to a game over (without any extraneous clutter)! It's a win-win!

B-BUT WAIT, THERE'S STILL MORE!!!!!!!

I've been using common events for certain things such as objecting, fading a character's sprite out when they leave a scene, and so forth. But I haven't been using them as much as I could be using them. And on top of that, the list of common events was just a mess. There was no order to the common events in there, and there were a bunch that were outdated/never going to be used again. So I put a whole bunch of stuff in common events that wasn't there before and organized everything. This will hopefully make things easier going forward, and it makes the events in trials in particular a lot more readable (those are just a total mess of conditional branches and lord knows what else).

So that's what I've been working on over the past month. As far as editing is concerned, I'm in the middle of editing the first trial. Editing the trial is taking longer than I'd like since the scenes are so long, I have to implement sprites for characters who didn't have multiple sprites before, I have to check every line of text for things that need to be fixed, I need to manually switch the Objection/Cycle Evidence options and everything that goes with them, and I need to re-implement common events and such since I did a total re-haul of the common events (as mentioned above). To give you a general idea, takes around 3-4 hours to edit one rebuttal/cross-examination. So it's a long process. But we're getting there.

That's about it. Sorry if this post isn't written super well, but I'm writing this in the dead of morning when I should be crawling in bed and getting some sleep. But one last fun fact before I go. After all that work I did, the number of pictures (which includes sprites, frames of animation, backgrounds, etc.) in the game is currently sitting at 1,647, whereas the number of songs is currently sitting at 125. Those numbers are only going to grow as development continues (especially with post-game stuff, which is going to seriously inflate those numbers. Those numbers are just crazy. Hard to look at them and fathom that I made and/or added them to the game one-by-one. That seems like a heck of a lot of work! And there's so more to do yet...

Anyways, I'm gonna go get some sleep. Dear God, I'm like a zombie right now. 'Til next time.

Edit: One last thing I forgot to mention. Seeing as I'm not super happy with the amount of progress in the past month (I hoped to be done with editing by now), I'm going to try picking up the pace a little moving forward. After I finish TEW2 and Subahibi (a visual novel I'm reading in the mornings before bedtime right now), I'm going to try to resist the temptation to start anything else and instead try to focus on DR Team. So we'll see how that goes.