Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

For fuck's sake! I managed to get one day in at the office this week before I got sick again. It looked perfectly manageable at first, with only a sore throat, sniffles, and other typical symptoms of the common cold, so I kept working as usual (albeit slower). And then, yesterday, the fever hit me, spiking equally as high as it did while I had covid, and I realized that I've got the flu. I did do a test since I was afraid I had covid yet again, but thankfully, that wasn't it.

So much for starting the new year with rapid progress, eh? I doubt I'll be in any shape to work on Supermodel this weekend unless I suddenly get a lot better overnight, which sucks. I wish I had better news, but this is what it is, and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. Know that I'm suffering in all kinds of ways right now if that helps...

In any case, my priority while I was able to work this week was to start to flesh out the environments and sprites that will appear regularly throughout the game. Creating environments, particularly in a modern setting with all the premade assets available for just that, tends to be pretty straightforward. But then you get a location like the fictional ANBC News lobby pictured above. The closest I could find was a hotel lobby asset, which conveyed the wrong mood. I ended up having ChatGPT come up with concept art for the lobby, which I then used as inspiration while I stripped the hotel lobby asset of all its furniture, changed its lighting to colder and brighter, and added a bunch of new furniture and NPCs. I think the results are pretty decent, even if the NPCs visible in this shot are mostly unlit. This gives them the infamous grayish-brown skin that inexperienced game developers using Daz Studio often encounter. But I don't really consider that much of a problem for background characters such as this, and I will likely keep it this way.

As I mentioned, I've also worked on sprites. Unlike with LLtP, Supermodel will frequently use sprites (character cutouts that are dynamically placed on top of the background) instead of prerendered scenes for dialogue, but not always. While this means I need to spend a little effort creating the sprites ahead of time, it will make future dialogues much faster to implement. If there's one thing I won't miss from LLtP, it's the way I sometimes had to render dozens of variations of facial expressions and open/closed mouths just for a routine dialogue scene. If I wanted to avoid that, I had to reuse an existing scene, which made things feel a little static. Supermodel should not feel that way.

Anyway, that's about all I can force my brain to output right now. I need to have a lie-down.

Until next time!