Monthly progress report

Plenty of news this time! The first one: I will be skipping this month's Patreon payments, so you should not be billed for this month. Mostly because I have been tinkering with all kinds of interesting but not strictly all that Offcuts-related stuff, so I don't feel it would be fair when I haven't even provided that much content for you to see. More information below.

The script for Amy's route is now mostly ready but some of the new visuals and scenes I have been working on have taken more time than I thought. I have already shown some of the character sprite improvements (like eye and mouth movement) and now I have extended some of the visual improvements to background images too. For example simple foliage movement in trees and grass, moving clouds etc. Check the attached video for a quick demo. Those changes make the outside scenes seem a bit more lively and nicer to look at, but of course they can be disabled in the preferences if you like the static ones (or if your computer is slow). I have also re-rendered several old backgrounds and created over 10 more unique scenes and backgrounds that will be in 0.3. The previous release 0.2 had only one or two new background images so this release will add quite a few new locations. Modelling or just tweaking existing scenes has also taken more time than I expected, but now they are all (mostly) ready. Due to all technical changes save games from earlier versions will not be compatible with 0.3, but any unlocked gallery images should be preserved. Ren'Py provides a good skipping functionality, so this should not be a major problem.

I can now finally focus on the actual CG's and finishing the script now that the locations are modelled and done. The current estimate for 0.3 is maybe about 2-3 weeks if nothing unexpected happens. I will probably spend this time mostly modelling and rendering CG's and posting them here to actually get some good Patreon content for you. As a side note, the CG's in the game gallery (and in-game) look now pretty static after watching scenes with moving backgrounds and sprites, but re-rendering hundreds of CG images to support simple 2D-animations is way too much work for now. And I'll try to get 0.3 out as fast as possible, so maybe release 0.4 after that might have more dynamic CG's or even actual "real" 3D-animations. Blender 2.8 alpha has been progressing nicely lately. Who knows...