Visual Novel: Progress Report - 8/27/24

Another week, another attempt at keeping everyone up to date with the VN progress!

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Rough Assets: As you can see, we added a few more characters to help flesh out the tower and make it a more fully realized place! Meet the rest of the cast!

• Kashka: The Grimsmith, a hobgoblin who works the tower's forges.

• Lorelai: The Spymaster, a changeling who manages the secrets of Dominus.

• Murk: The Alchemist, a goblin who brews potions and elixirs for Quintessa.

• Nox: The Best Boy, a shadow hound that acts as sentry against would-be enemies.

There may be a few more one-off characters that make appearances in the tower as the game progresses, but these - in addition to Lilith from the previous update - will be the characters you interact with most often as the game progresses. My next project with these assets will be to get some cutscenes cooking, which leads me to...

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Coding: We ran into a hiccup in the middle of last week, when I realized we were gonna have an issue moving forward with anything until I figured out how to code cutscenes to interact with the existing navigation rules. I was finally able to find the time to figure out the issues Sunday night, so now I have some working cutscene triggers that will hopefully allow the story to move forward while maintaining the open-world feel I was hoping for. My next project will be to filter multiple smaller triggers into what I'm choosing to call "Chapter Triggers", so I can hopefully keep the code shorter and cleaner as time goes on.

I do still want to get on a working day-tracker for properly timing quests, though - as I get into scripting actual scenes - I do want to gauge whether it feels unnecessary for this leg of the game. Once you, the players, branch out from Dominus into the rest of the map, I do want to have a time-tracker, but perhaps the feel of this portion of the game should feel as though time is un-trackable? Like a casino, if that makes sense...

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That's probably enough update for now. I think my goal for next week will be to have a few fully-rendered cutscenes that trigger once, then disappear once completed. Until then, see ya Friday!

--SA