Novus
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Left Hand Magic - Build 1 Release!
🕑 Added 2022-01-09 04:39:51 +0000 UTCWohoo! Finally. A day later than I thought would be the maximum delay T-T. But, that was the whole illness that. I once again apologize for this being so late, everyone. That said, I won't belabor the point longer. If you just want to play, you can skip the next bit by going down to the the TL;DR line. For those that want to hear my musings on the build, just read on :-).
Build 1 (the first release was just a demon) is actually something I'm fairly proud of? And about...95% satisficed with. From a graphical standpoint, there's only a single animation that is a bit rough (no, I'm not going to say which one), that I might need to revisit at some point. Otherwise, I'm completely happy with the still renders and animations. And I'm just as happy with my writing, I think I've done a good job on that point so far, nothing to be unsatisfied with. There are two things that bother me with the build though. One minor...one less so.
The minor one first...is Relationship Panel is currently sort of...ugly. No where near as bad as Chastity Quest's first stat page but still not exactly polished. The reason for this, oddly, is that I sort of just...drew a blank. I legitimately don't know what I want it to look like. I did make a single attempt to create something suitable for a background at least. But the result made the whole thing sort of hard to read. In the end, I slapped together the current panel since I needed SOMETHING and I'm just not sure what to do with it yet. Hopefully, I'll be able to come up with something better for Build 2. Honestly, for an early release, it's not really a major problem.
The less minor issue...sound/music. I'm discovering just how out of my depth I actually am as a sound designer. It's something I've simply never touched on in a serious way...and I'm struggling with it a lot. I just don't know how to balance background music styles, let alone know where I should take the time to interrupt the background music for a sound effect or something? I think I'm going to have to put a lot more thought into it going forward...but I admit I'm a bit mentally stuck on where to even start. Any feedback on what already exists is appreciated.
The Credits also currently kinda suck. That's just a matter of needing to spend some time figuring out the formatting for Renpy's non-message-box text, though.
Those 2.5 things (plus the one less than perfect animation) make up pretty much my only reservations as far as this build goes. No, it isn't quite as big as I'd originally wanted (I'd originally hoped to get Talia's first three interactions done as well). But, that having been said, there's actually quite a lot of content in it. More to the point, I established a lot more of the codebase that I'll be able to reuse going forward, so hopefully future builds will be a tad larger than this, with fewer stumbling blocks!
===================TL:DR=============
Note: I will release a guide to stat gains/loss for the various girls for the $10 people either tonight or (more likely) tomorrow. Honestly, it's not really needed yet, but better to start on it upfront.
Build 1 extends from the demo I released before, adding the Prologue content where you can get introduced to each of the girls, and covering three of the girls through the first few days of the game's timeline. Each of the girls now has at least one H-animation in the game!
Links:
PC/Linux:
Mac:
Mega
Android:
Comments
Novus
As for the first bit, I'll have to even see if I still have the photoshop PSD file I used to make the news story thing work. It was supposed to be a one-off background-only, so I have no idea if I saved it. The second one...yikes, will fix. Apparently, percent signs must need escape characters. Didn't realize or catch it myself, so thanks for pointing it out. Third one was simply an editing error. Fixed it in the dev version. I'll probably wait a few days for any more bug reports, then release a patch for the minor stuff. Thankfully, unlike with Visual Novel Maker, that's fairly easy to do with Renpy. Well, for the PC/Linux/Mac versions at least. As always, thanks a bunch for the error/typo reports!
George Lever
So, very minor quibble that I missed to start with: the news story in the background when you first walk into Left Hand Solutions says "... sues local sex clube for using ...". Second: during Trix's 1st work scene the "100% safe" line turns into a Ren'Py error halfway through. Third: when Trix is talking about her problem solver, she "cansum cum".
