Novin
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Just a weekly update
🕑 Added 2020-03-29 23:40:54 +0000 UTCHope you're all staying healthy out there! Looks like dark teal won the poll handily, so that's what the geomancer's hair will be changed to. Unfortunately, I didn't quite get what I wanted to done this week, so a test version hasn't been sent out. Ended up getting pretty side-tracked by reworking the faceset system to be simpler long term.
/start system detail rant
Little (as in, overly long and detailed, you have been warned) explanation here: the way the MC's face is put together is a combination of scripting, eventing, and plug-ins in a mish-mash way. The plug-in at the center of this, sumrndmdde's charactercreatorex and the extension plug-ins to it, basically puts together faces/sprites from pieces and parts, which makes life easier. It also has an option to color these parts that I didn't use, because rather than applying a gradient, like an external program I use does, it simply changes hue, saturation and luminosity, which... doesn't look as good. The way I got around this was by making a different part for each color, so I had 4 parts for each rear hair, 4 parts for each front hair, 4 parts for each eyebrow etc.
Basically, anything that had to change color had to have 4 of them. This would also lead to having to having four entries for each version of a face that had different eyebrows. This also extended to hair accessories, like the hairpin and the yellow ribbon, each color of hair had a separate version of the accessory.
On top of this I have hair color change as a goal, so each additional hair color would then expand the number of message faces, accessories, and parts I would have to juggle.
So, weighing the fact that gradient colored hair just looks better with exponential increases I decided to just change things over to the hue change. Which ended up being more of an ordeal than I expected. Using an external program to figure out what each HSL configuration looks like helped, but it never quite looked the same in-engine, so some slow painful tweaking of numbers while restarting the engine repeatedly to check the effect was necessary. Also went through a lot of eye color tweaking until I realized HSL was simply a horrible way to change eye color (since it also changed the whites and the center pupil always looked off), so for that, less changed, bit exponential increase is acceptable, for now at least (I have a way around this, it'll just take a large amount of iteration and editing).
I also figured the plug-in that allowed equipment to change hair and other parts would simply use the base hair color of the actor it was being applied to. Unfortunately, it defaulted to blonde unless a color was inputted. While inputting a color for each part while having 4 accessories per hair was possible, it would defeat the purpose of the change. So, I had to dig through the plug-in and get rid of the root of the problem.
On top of all this, I was adding a make-up category to the parts I already have... for reasons.
/end system detail rant
TL;DR: Some system stuff required a lot more work than expected, it's finished now, hair color will look different and the Geomancer's hair color will be the dark teal that won.
Not that that's all I've gotten done by any means, though. I've completed the soul degradation system and some cutscenes/events/a shop attached to that. I'm trying to complete a playthrough with no fusion (other than the mandatory one) at the moment to see how balance is with it so I can tweak things as I go before sending the current build off to testers to get their input.
The post current public release content stuff is 75% written, and I have most of it mapped. There's a gimmick involved that will take a decent amount of testing to sort out, though. Also, there are some resources I'll have to create for it (already created some).
The side dungeon, the "dream of vanity" has been progressing well in the last week, I've got most of it mapped and the eventing mapped out with a lot of iteration based on who you have with you in mind, but I'm having trouble finding a good battler graphic for the boss(es), I have graphics that I'm willing to settle on that I probably should.
Minor spoiler on the configuration of the dungeon:
How you approach this dungeon will change the boss (and thus the fragment). Also, how much combat there will be depends on your approach. There's an approach that will end with you running into a handful of minions that you can dodge as usual, and there's an approach that will have you just going through the dungeon with a minimum of fighting.
Long story short, I'll probably be sending a test version out in the next few days.
