Steady Progress

Hello everyone!  Last week was pretty choc-full, between a new picture pack, the public launch of Eva MZ and Friday's totally super-serious announcement, so this week will be a bit quieter by comparison.

For clarity, no I'm not changing the game's art assets to Koikatsu Sunshine, though now that Magical Missy and Demon Jess exist, I'm sure we'll see them again down the road!

So where does Missy MZ stand after its first week of development?  Well, as per my 4-step plan outlined previously, I've replaced all of the major scripts except for those pertaining to combat.  The combat system in MZ is a little different and may need a slightly larger change than the rest of the game, but the more I've seen, the more confident I am that it will do what I want it to do more easily than before, so the long-trailed combat overhaul may end up happening organically as part of this update.

Meanwhile, stage 2, (common events) is also all-but complete (these were always going to be the quickest two stages) and the game runs... sort of.

As for stages, 3 and 4, Missy's house is now entirely back to normal and no longer looking like that room from Squid Game with all the stairs.  Work has started on the school.  

In this picture, we can see one of the small quality-of-life changes in the new version, each dialogue box now shows the character's name as well as her image.  I know some of you struggle with the girl's names given that there's so many characters in the game already, so this should help.  You can also see the size difference in the sprites from the old version.  Missy and Jess, who were redone for Christmas Eva look like giants compared with Emma and Vicky who are still VX Ace size!

...they do now both have proper face sets though.  This seemed like as good a time as any to start getting these done for the secondary characters and since both these two will be playing a role in Chapter 4, it's time we saw their pretty faces properly.

Stages 3 and 4 are being done in semi-tandem as this is the most logical way to ensure I don't miss anything.  As I go through each map, its appearance is being put right and then each event is being re-coded in order.  This is by far the biggest slog and will take up most of my time to do, so it's the best indicator of how far along the project is.  

There are currently 80 maps in the game (including the starting splash and the Dev areas, which don't really count,) and I've completely re-done 13 so far.  Now that I'm onto the school, where the vast majority of the game's code is, progress will be a little slower through this stretch, but the pace of work is good.

That's all for today, more news on Friday!

Trinian