Development Blog - May 2021

Hello everyone! Here is another monthly Devblog. What have we done in the last month? What can we tell? To be honest, there are some news! We think you will be glad to hear them.

1. The Remake of the Simon's sprite

As we told earlier, we've redrawn Simon's sprite. This kitty looks way more handsome and pleasant to look at! What do you think? Now he looks more like a Simon that you might have seen in the Main menu already. Don't you want to cuddle with him?

2. The Work on the 5th CG

The development isn't standing and here is a little peek at the new game art process! You might tell already what is going on there. Simon is having a good time, isn't he? :)

3. The Progress with Soundtrack Art 

We are also doing some finishing touches on the Soundtrack Cover and soon it will be done! Simon loves listening to music. What about you? 

And now here are the words of our programmer John. He is also working hard!

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"What makes a Ren'Py game good? The key point is that you need to use the engine for what it was intended for: visual novels. If you need to introduce more advanced gameplay elements into the game and to present the game in a more advanced technical level, then it is better to take on another engine: Godot or Unity. It's like hammering in nails with your fist: it's better to take an actual hammer for this.

Of course, RenPy has good functionality in the form of "Rollback" and the ability to skip scenes, encouraged for its simplicity and the ability to "break" the game as you like: editing saved game states, console, you can relatively freely change the logic and content of the game.

Creating a development environment for the game using pygame and RenPy turned out to be not the best idea. The interface elements provided by the game by default are not quite designed to implement the game's advanced interface. In fact, everything can be done, but it will take much more time than using IDEs. Ren'Py does not contain any signs of an IDE, and changing the way it works means either editing the engine code or creating workarounds for solving problems, and it can take more time and effort to develop and maintain more advanced functionality for a game with simple gameplay than it should have been.

Here's a quick mock-up of how the current "generator" of scenes and characters could be improved:

It looks quite simple. However, it is quite difficult to make all interface elements work as you expect: selective focusing of input fields does not work, many things are tied to event-based logic rather than state-driven, and other nuances, the description of which would be enough for several pages.

If we continue to use RenPy as the main engine for developing games, then we will have to develop completely separate software for such purposes, and use RenPy itself only for live rendering of the results of this program.

In order to finish the game, we need to modify the game interface so players can feel comfortable paying in a way they want: with a keyboard and mouse, a gamepad and a touch interface. We wait until all the game assets are ready and when registration in Steamworks will be completed.

At the moment, mock-ups for the touch interface looks like this. Hopefully it looks good on tablets and mobile phones, despite the possible aspect ratio mismatch with your devices."

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As you can see, the work is going great!

In May we will be busy with arts and probably at the start of June we won't have any reward for Patreon because of that (The Pastry Chef Stefan will be still available). However, we will give you one in the July-August, so stay tuned!

Also, don't forget to read the VIP-Blog, If you are interested in our characters. Thank you all so much for the support and see next month, woof!