Hi Lance.
So to explain the art, Wil's sprite is coloured in greyscale. The dynamic colouriser Feniks made uses RGB channels to help increase the flexibility of the tool. This means I can use a red channel, for example, to add a rosiness across certain areas of the sprite to increase the depth of the shading.
Fen and I played a lot with my sprites and art when they were developing that tool to see how close to my original colouring style. And we were both sometimes astonished by how close it can get. It is a really phenomenal tool.
I can set some defined skin tones that have a range of swatches correlating to the different levels of shading on the greyscale sprite. These are, in my case, based on the fully rendered skin tones that I did previously.
I defined 5 different skin tones, each with this full range of shading and then the slider extrapolates the in between skin tones.
In my case there was a lot of tweaking of the art to figure out how to best set up the files for the colouriser.
It gets a little more complex when you have something like a smiling mouth where the lips need to get recoloured but the teeth do not. So you end up with a sprite file that looks like this:
The blue channel is adding depth to the lip shading and the green channel is keeping the teeth white.
Once I figured out how the colouriser was going to affect my art, then from an art standpoint it wasn't actually hard because you're just colouring in grey scale. Then adding these red, green, and blue elements for coding purposes. And honestly, for me, shading in greyscale is pretty simple.
The difficulty in the colour slider was really testing swatches (which wasn't difficult per se, but was a little time consuming until I got the hang of it - like any new tool) and the coding itself as far applying the colourised art to a sprite, then CGs, then a gallery.
And I think the coding was harder for me because frankly, I'm a very low level coder. Windchimes helped me with it and was subsequently traumatised by those bright green teeth. 🤣🤣
Yeah, when you are in the middle of the writing process, it feels like treading water. I call it "writing purgatory" because it absolutely feels like being in limbo. But that is the drawback of working on large games. Well, one of the drawbacks.
I'm also really excited about the save screen. I think it's probably the feature people are most excited about. I think some players are close to asking to be able to romance the save screen. 🤣🤣
So currently I am the only tester. I always do a full play test of my own before anyone else sees it. As far as others go - I have a group of close friends and people I've known for a while that sometimes get alpha access for more of a "beta reading" phase.
And beyond that, in the past, most of the beta testers were from Patreon and Kickstarter. This time around I'm not doing a Kickstarter so it'll be Patreon where most of them come from most likely. I may drag in a few other friends and acquaintances from Discord too.
As far as I'm aware there is no issue with the game file as there have been thousands of downloads without issue over the last year. A download error is much more likely to be something outside my control such as a problem with internet connectivity, even itch.io.
The only advice I can give is to enable alternate download mode, which you can do if click the small link next to the download button. You will get a small pop up that allows you to do this.
