Hana Exposure v1.5 Progress Log 2

The idea was to keep the development of v1.5 in the background, and focus the monthly development logs more so on Purple Dream, as that's where my focus was going to be, but plans change!

The main thing that has been going on with Purple Dream has been the development of the event/CG system. The one in Hana Exposure is very rudimentary and bare bones, and for various reasons it would not be possible for something like it to be used in PD, and for this reason I have been making a new and more powerful system for it. But rather than just make something rudimentary that would work for PD, I have instead been working on making a system that is genuinely really cool and powerful. Something that would be up there among the top for the genre. For this reason though, there are many things that I am testing and tweaking, and things that I have yet to confirm whether they are viable or not. I'll be talking about the system in great detail in the first PD progress log, but the reason I am mentioning it, is to give an idea of how the system is changing and evolving constantly. This affects artwork, with the system and its requirements constantly changing throughout this stage in development, it makes this a really bad time to make artwork for PD, since any change or new requirement for the system would likely require tweaks and adjustments to the existing artwork in order for it to work well. Basically, right now is a terrible idea to make artwork for PD.

With that being the case, I have instead opted to focus most of the artwork resources into the v1,5 expansion for Hana Exposure while I finish the CG system for PD. This has been the case for about a month and a half. The only "issue" that this caused was that the development of v1.5 was advancing a lot faster than expected on the artwork side of things, and rather than let the artwork sit idly as I slowly chipped at the development of v1.5 as I intended to, I decided to instead to pour more time into it to keep up with the speed of the artwork. Long story short, this month I spent a lot of time on v1.5, and the development of it nearing completion.

Throughout this month a lot of progress has been made, but there have also been some very important changes to the v1.5.

For starters, the idea was for it to focus on adding the NPC events, as well as the social events, but things changed a little bit.

The focus on NPC events is absolutely still thee, but the landscape for them changed a bit. Originally I had worked on 6 different persistent NPC events which would have a new event for most levels, as well some other minor one off NPC events. They were all going to mostly going to play through normal dialogue with Hana's dialogue sprite, without any CGs. This was going to make them fairly simple and small, but things took a different turn. Out of those 5 different persistent NPC event lines, while writing them, there were 2 NPC event lines that I ended up making into something couldn't just be an NPC event, and they ended up becoming full on event lines, with their own unique CGs, etc.

One of them is an additional event that will happen during the crater activity, making it so that there are now 3 different event while playing through that activity. The other one is a bit different, I called an even event line, but it technically became its own activity. It's an event that is available during the "leisure" activity at the Inn, which was just for Hana to sleep and save. Previously there were no events in that activity, but now there is one event per level. This new event line will turn the sleeping activity at the Inn, into an actual actual activity with an event available which needs to be cleared in order for Hana to be able to level up. Something worth noting is that even it's technically a single event, but the content and situations it offers are more so two different events merged into one lengthy event. Also, since the activity is tied to saving the game, interacting with the event is optional, and Hana can simply go straight to bed in order to save.

Overall, this is good news. Those 2 event lines were going to be simpler NPC events, but evolved into something bigger and better. That leaves 4 persistent NPC event lines. Out of those 4, there was one I was not satisfied with, which was the pool one, and so I am shelving it, which leaves 3 NPC event lines.

The 3 remaining event lines also saw a change in their landscape, and this was due to the new event line for the Inn. For those events there is a new CG that was made, which worked far too well with the 3 NPC event lines, and so rather than keeping those NPC event lines as non-CG/dialogue sprite only events, I also evolved them into CG events which are longer and spicier than before. They are still considered NPC events, but a lot of their events now have CGs.

The ones that remained mostly unchanged were the one off NPC events. There's not many of them, with there only being 6 of them which take place during the last two levels. These are dialogue sprite events.

The other change for v1.5 has been the social events. These are a bit demanding CG wise, as an example, there is a single one that is finished and that social event alone has 5 different CGs. These are CG hungry, and with the two new event lines, as well as the NPC events now requiring a lot of new CGs and artwork which was not the original plan, it would now take too long for the CGs of the new event lines, as well as the social events to be made as well. I have decided to cut the other social events, and only keep the one that is already made, which is honestly the most important one. Fun stuff with Nube and Mei in it!

That's about it for now. Wasn't intending on talking about v1.5, but as you can see, things changed quite a bit, for the better in most cases. As it stands, so long as there are no delays with the remaining CGs, the update should be done in May, or June at the latest if things slow down.

Thank you for supporting the development of Hana Exposure and Purple Dream!