26/12 Patreon Devlog

Hi everyone!

Time for this week's devlog and the last devlog of 2020!  I hope you're all having a lovely Christmas and/or Boxing Day. 

At this point we're all getting used to end-of-year posts that state "It's been a rough year" but...man, has it been a rough year. It sometimes has felt like every bad thing has been stored up and suddenly dumped out this year. 

Every personal struggle this year has felt magnified by the intense global situation so it's felt like one thing after another and another and another.

But we've made it through to the end and we can only hope next year is better.

In the meantime...

This was  a weirdly productive week, it feels like...=O

Summary:

• Completed through Maggie Chapter Five
• Started Chapter Six
• Two new BGs
• One new BG sketch
• Completed a Caissa CG
• Worked on a new side character sprite from Quill's route
• Updated Renpy to the new 7.4 pre-release
• Killed a weird bug (a game bug - not some random Aussie bug)
• Played around with some new features

The Ramble:

Writing wise…..just writing. Not much to report on that front other than "YES I WROTE THINGS" - writing is progressing.

Artwise, we got two new completed BGs from our artists and a new sketch. There are currently three BGs remaining to be completed, I believe. So our background situation is looking good.

I also completed one of Caissa's CGs and a new side character sprite from Quill's route. There's no reason to work on side character sprites from that route yet but sometimes a character just pops into my head so clearly I want to draw them and just get them out of the way.

The character's name is Lock.

The CG is one of a couple that features Caissa by himself rather than a romantic moment. So it wasn't too difficult to finish. Just took a couple of hours. So he now has 1 of his 5 route exclusive CGs done. (As I said, I'm honestly hoping to do more than 5 per route but 5 is the number I am committing to). You can see a sneak peek below.

I also made a few other sprite related tweaks and updates.

And did work on some coding related things this week.

Renpy has been working on another major update to the engine. This update is currently in a pre-release state. I've been very hesitant to update because frankly, updating renpy tends to randomly break things. At some point, a project is too far along for me to want to risk breaking things and scrambling for fixes before release.

But Gilded Shadows is still far enough from release I have time to fix any bugs, and there are some features in the new update I'm interested in for this project. So I've been wanting to try the update but putting it off."

I finally 'took the plunge' as it were.

Some things (like live2d support) are irrelevant to me as a developer. Other things - like being able to tint images - are very quite useful and relevant.

As soon as I updated, my game broke (charmingly). I was able to fix the very perplexing bug where suddenly some of my .png files were unreadable to renpy. (We have a theory about why Renpy suddenly couldn't read the files as well and it has to do with UTF-8 encoding and metadata embedded into the png files.) It required me to re-export the png files in photoshop. I got all the obvious ones but it's possible there are still some unreadable pngs lurking in the game. I guess we'll find out in future testing. LoL

Anyway, I also played around with the new colour tinting capabilities which is the main thing I wanted to try out.

Renpy has always been able to colour tint images - this lets you do things like cool down the sprite images to match a night background, or tint something in sepia. The main issue is that while this was easy to do for backgrounds or very, very simple sprites - applying tints to more complex sprites was tedious and finicky, and required a lot more code.

It's not impossible, of course. But when you have sprites set up the way I do - and when you have a lot of them, you have to re-declare every piece of the sprite in the new tint.

So, for instance, to create a sepia version of every sprite, I would need to duplicate the entire sprite code for every single sprite. To create a night version (basically blue tinted), I would need to duplicate the sprite code again with the new tint. It just becomes tedious and it makes your sprite code annoyingly long.

The new colour tinting capabilities allow you to tint layered sprites with a single line of code, which makes it so much easier. I did some testing with that and am really happy with it. My only issue right now is figuring out how to make it work with the side image (IE. Morgan's sprite.)

Renpy handles side images quite differently than it handles other images so sometimes things just don't quite work the same way (or don't work at all) with side images.

But it's nice to have some flexibility, allowing me to tint the sprites for night time or darker images. It also lets me easily create things like silhouettes without needing a completely new image as well.

Sneak Peeks and Previews:

Yet another apartment. LoL The Future Hexagons (tm) have made yet another appearance.

And a screen cap of the tinted sprites!

You can really see how cool toned the guys are compared to Morgan, who doesn't have a tint applied.

I really am not sure if I like the idea of leaving Morgan untinted or not. In some ways it's useful to keep her separated from the on-screen action. But my main concern has to do with her range of skin tones and the possibility I may not be able to find a cool tint that looks okay across all her skin tones.

Anyway, I'll continue playing with it. It's a useful feature since background lighting isn't usually applied to sprites and needs to be done manually. OwO

Upcoming Week:

This week…

I don't know. My spouse is off work but since there's a resurgence of Covid in my state right now, we're not doing anything in particular. I have no idea how much work I'll be able to get done.

If there are too many interruptions and I can't write, I may focus on doing more CGs. It's much easier to do art with interruptions since I can draw and talk to someone at the same time.

Writing with distractions is a big no. LoL

Either way, we shall have to see what happens! 

Next time I see you will be in the new year. Here's hoping it's less of a wild ride than 2020 has been.

~Esh