Part 8
Here we are once again. its a day after the original submission date. I don't know if i missed that it was going to have a two week submission window or if that came up midway through this past month, it's kind of been a blur. Well now I know, so I put some expansions on my "scope achievable by the submission date". i Asked my girlfriend that is a writer to whip up some more dialog,reviews,boss lines,book quotes and generally give each of the NPC's i had wanted in my world some character and a foundation on which to base things.
Before I could bring my NPC's to life i had to create their sprites.
i updated the art for them. refined the outfit body diversity and then set to work.
only to realize i had so many more sprites i still needed to get into my system. so now for hours and hours of finding the space, enting the numbers, testing offsets. i kinda wish now that id take the 3-4 days to make the editor to do this easier.
well might as well get to work.
Into the sprite mines I go, for there is gold at the end of a lot of hard work and long hours.
All too often miners, and indeed other trade unionists, underestimate the economic strength they have.
a hundred is sprites later i had a whole host of sprites selected and set.
BUT WHAT ABOUT COMPOUND SPRITES!
ok , well i guess it was about at this point that i started to become impacted by the process and needed to do something else.
i went and designed the main menu, but for continuity ill show that in a second. lets jump back to the part where i did the compound sprites. (im still not done , but this has to be done in chunks or ill die. )
so the way i designed it ill be able to pal shift the outfits and skin tones to match the heads when they are drawn.
i also quickly added in a little activation prompt for the NPC,s as well as a facing behavior so they are always facing you. i want them to mill about when you aren't talking to them but we will see if i can get there. long term, i want them to move around and have different lines based on what they are doing, right now it's a generic set of things they feel and believe.
if the game didn't feel political before, its definitely does now.
trigger warning: wokeness
That's kind of as far as i got with the Npc system. I still need to hook up their reviews and bookcases.
Making a menu-er
original concept
cleaned up art.
the final sprite sheet for the menu cart.
I split the Mikan soft logo into quarters, since i can just draw them flipped. i really wanted the company logo fade in and out, then the menu comes up, the way so many games do. (im reminded to put a 1992 somewhere in this. )
so i had each element move in using Lerps. went for something urgent feeling. Also the main theme kicks in when the mikan logo come up.
i used pal shifting to get the fade in and out, i just had to make an array of step colors to shift to for every color in the pico palette.
the background felt a little empty so lets get some sort of repeating moving background image. like a letter or something?
I really like how that looks. I think it get across the ideas at play. mail moving, running around. Press X to "Go to Work" is very fun.
there will be instruction and thank you pages after this. ill show them when they are done. thats all for now.
thanks for reading :)
tune in for more soon.
~Alice<3