A little more on the proposed Missy MZ

Hello everyone, I hope you all had a great weekend!  I spent a good chunk of mine doing more research and preparation on the proposed upgrade.  Here is Missy's bedroom in MZ, which I can now walk around and touch stuff without the game crashing!

The poll is currently leaning very heavily towards supporting the project, so I'm using today's update to give you a little more information on what that will look like should it stay that way.  If you haven't voted yet, remember that you have until Friday, and if you do have doubts or concerns, I'd like to reiterate that I can be contacted here or through Discord.

My apologies to those of you who were hoping to try the mobile version of Christmas Eva.  This has been considerably more complicated to learn how to do than I anticipated, and will take some time yet.  I will keep you posted.  It'll be the focus of my work between now and Friday while we wait for the poll results.

Having now more or less got my head round what exactly needs to change to make the game work in the new engine, I've come up with an implementation order, which I can use to keep you updated on the conversion's progress.  The broad steps in that process will be:

1. Plugins and scripts - the stuff that makes the game work under the hood.  The most important ones are already in place, as Eva wouldn't have worked without them.
2. Scripting in common events - functions that are either running all the time or can be called from any part of the game (such as the function that checks and updates Missy's sprite when you change clothes, or the new school day script.)
3. Each individual map - Each event on each map can then be edited with new script calls.  At this point, the game will work, but look weird.
4. Graphics and Sprites - This is that part where all the sprites and face sets will be changed, as we've seen with the characters in Christmas Eva. It's also the part where the re-rendering of the 3D images will happen.  Which will be easy, but take a while as there's 2,500 of them!

What does the game look like without stage 4?  Let's take a look just for fun!

This is what the upstairs landing currently looks like!  Missy's bedroom was a similar fever-dream from an 80's platformer before I fixed it.  The reason it looks like this is because all the tile sets are different and it's looking in the wrong places for some of the graphics.  I'll keep it looking as broadly the same as possible by the time it's finished.

This, once again, gives you an idea of how much bigger the renders are going to be in the new engine.  That is the current picture size in the new window.  As you can see, it only takes up roughly 1/3 of the screen.  I may also take the opportunity to improve some of the older scenes before rendering them if time permits.

I hope you've enjoyed this little behind-the-scenes glimpse into the work I've been doing on getting ready for Missy MZ.  I'm pleased that so far, so many of you have shown such faith in me to deliver it.  See you Friday for the poll results!

Trinian