2025-11-09
Still busy with class...
Still busy with class...
Oops! Almost two months with no blog posts!
Shortly after my last post here, my college semester started back up so I've had a lot less time to work on my game while balancing studying and making art and other social stuff...
That being said, I've still been working when I can! I've been piecing together the story for my game in private, but as such I have little to share or provide insight about here, unfortunately. I'm committed to this project and want to try and carve out time for it when I can, since I could definitely stand to budget my own free time better anyway, haha.
Also, I lied actually. I can share a little bit.
The most noticeable change I've made in-game recently is in the player character's sprite. Their sprite has more or less stayed the same since around 2021 or so with minor palette tweaks, but I decided to simplify their design a bit. This was mainly to make elements of the character feel more intentional, and also to help the sprite contrast better against area graphics.
The main character was always meant to resemble a lamb in a big sweater, and I think the newer design helps get that point across a lot better than before. I especially prefer the newer side profile; the hair is a bit tidier, and I think the rounder face makes the player appear less like a weird human with horns or something.
Oh yeah, the screenshot attached higher up also shows part of new area I've been working on recently. I don't have much to share from this yet, but it is part of the main town that the game will be set in.
I'll have more to add to this blog in the future! I guess I wrote more than I thought I would today, at least...
This might be sort of a boring update, but I still wanted to detail it regardless...
Until recently, any time a menu was needed in my project it would be coded up from scratch with the same functionality and a similar general layout to other menus. This setup worked alright, but any time I'd change any UI colors or fonts all the spacing and legibility could get messed up between all the different menu objects, and it would be kind of a headache to fix everything manually.
So for the past couple of days, I've put some work into a new single object type to remedy this! It can display passed lists and get player input. UI components like textboxes or the inventory/settings screens can create, interface with, and close menus of this type when necessary.
This change was inspired by looking at some older RPGMaker games and noticing the engine itself would generally provide games with a consistent windowing framework that could be styled across the board for displaying UI elements.
As much as I like designing little interfaces for specific purposes, I couldn't help but feel like my game won't delve deeply enough into resource or stat management to warrant anything beyond a classic list-based UI, so I think this new system should work well to help streamline development a bit.
This will (hopefully) be the start to my personal dev blog thingy.
Normally I'm a bit hesitant to put out public updates or sneak previews of my gamedev stuff, mainly since I don't want to overshare before I have enough done... That being said, I've had a few friends show interest in the idea of there being a little place where I put out progress updates from time to time, so I thought it could be a fun thing to try regardless!