Dev Diary #33: Construction in progress!

Hey everyone!
Finally a little time to do this post. As I said before, we're incredibly busy right now, unfortunately not with Sexy Exile alone, but we're making good progress nonetheless.

Above you can see a quick scroll over the Date Level that Cucu is building. Even though she hasn't arranged all of the events yet, all the dialogues are already in there. When all paths are laid out, she "only" needs to edit the flow of the dialogue lines with all the little pauses and such, determine where the backdrop changes (from park to cinema for example) and when Mayu will make a sound (we're expecting recording tests for those later this week).

Already done are the various portrait combinations and when during the dialogues which of them will be displayed. I recently mentioned that I was adding such a functionality to our internal level editor.
It looks like this now:

[pic: Portrait Editor]

Here we can now configure different portrait states by arranging layers for the body, pieces of clothe, accessoires if necessary and a dynamic layer for the facial expressions. This enables us to create all the variations we need without the need to have dozens of only slightly different graphic files and - even better - to transition between them smoothly and easily.

It is then possible to assign any change in facial expression or portrait state to any line of dialogue. With that feature, the level editor really starts to get extensive, as you can see here:

[pic: Level Editor]

You can see the little bust-like symbols where facial expressions or portrait states change. Parallely, I have been using as much of my spare time as possible to polish the Date Mode code itself, which is coming together quite nicely. Still need to make the portrait system work on that end, though. So as always, more on that soon.

Enjoy your week!

x
Zanzo