(Time Range: After 2021-10-02 17:55:01 -0400 to approx. 2021-11-11 11:14:49 -0500)

Chapter 3: Getting Serious About MSPaint

Hooray, it's the final "retro" Patch Notes entry! After this one, the game's development continues from the Git repository we currently work within, which makes it a lot easier to gather even more detailed information. It becomes much less of a pain to capture in-game footage and screenshots. Stay tuned!

The crux of this period of development was to bring the in-game painting minigame from placeholder to playable prototype, as well as block out some later-game linear/CG content (dates, events)

October, 2021

Oct 6: We first prototyped what we wanted the minigame to generally look like, as if it was inhabiting the 3D world of the game. (Of course, I couldn't resist offering some example artwork)

Oct 15: We took a stab at emotion overlays!

Oct 17: We did some work on exterior and interior times of day.

Oct 24: A new re-usable space for date scenes!

Oct 25: Work began in earnest on the paint minigame.

(In the right image, you can see some buggy behavior if you drag the mouse outside of the window boundaries and back in on a different side of the screen)

Under-the-hood, the minigame was insulated from the actual names of the places in the story it is attached to. The minigame no longer cares about these story labels, but there is also now an "airlock" script that the game goes through to get into and out of the minigame. Overall it makes it a lot easier to work with and insert into the story wherever we like.

Oct 30: More environment work! As well as the majority of the minigame progress!

Blocking out new buttons over the static background...

A functioning button grid to go over the color palatte!

Getting the new color palette closer. Showing some of the code involved.

Success! Testing that all the colors work.

Also updated Ren'Py to 7.4.10.2178, cleaned up some script organization, made sure the background during the minigame is always clear of characters, allowing the player to skip the minigame, and doing some preliminary work for custom character names.

Oct 31: More date posing and blocking, and another burst of minigame progress!

We used about twelve different references for being polite and offering someone a chair! But we can't show it because of licensing and etc., so how about some code?

People like to see code, right? Code is fun? You'd be reading the Dev Diary if you didn't want to see any code ever?

Defining new tools and trying them out!

More or less fully-working minigame! The paint bucket tool is disabled but all other left- and right-side buttons work! (Not the top bar. Not yet....................................)

November, 2021

Nov 2: Tackling something that has been needed for a while... name input, and respecting the player's custom name!

Nov 4: More CG work, and more name-input work! Spoilers I guess?

My personal favorite easter egg, have fun trying to figure out how to trigger it when we have a playable again!

Nov 7: We cleaned up some excess data from our project and optimized our Ren'Py builds. As well as debugging and working on CGs.

We found and fixed this bug where Hugo's "non-CG" normal intro and special CG intro were overlapping.

Nov 8: We tested our test-build Itch distribution page! So our team can constantly play the most up-to-date builds from anywhere!

Nov 10: Our composite "date-chair" mock-up based on the 12 references from Oct 31 we couldn't include! But at least we can show the final result.

Nov 11: Another Art Show CG, and we cap off this period of work by officially centralizing both our Ren'Py game as well as our Unity Engine rendering scenes project on our Couch Lion GitHub!

So at this point in the process, we are calling the game version "1.1.3", and we are now both working on the game and testing the results in a centralized and partially-automated way, which is a great improvement! We always have to work with each other asynchronously and remotely, and everything we can do to reduce the barriers for our team members both to work on the game as well as to play it and provide feedback and find bugs for us (without having to ask where things are at, or where to get the game) makes the process smoother.

Thanks as always for reading! Remember to check out the Dev Diary!

- A Couch Lion