It's Friday...Again

I got all sorts of good things done today, thanks to the awesome feeling of having finished with all my tests and papers for this week (too bad I have even more next week...). :D

The most important thing I did today was that I got the calendar system working. When you travel to different places, days pass. Every 30 days, the season and "month" changes. Thus, what you get is an overlay like this, where "Ortus" is the "month" name and "6" is the day of the month. The rose changes colors according to the season. The bit below it is the time of day, which will be important because when you go to a town, you can only do one action per time of day, and only during the Morning, Afternoon, and Late Afternoon portions of the day.

You'll notice also that the textbox has changed a bit again, reflecting some of the changes I mentioned before. Roses more red to stand out, plus the click-to-continue indicator. I'm actually satisfied with the quality of the textbox and layout now, but the free resource backgrounds are bugging the heck out of me. :/ I wish I could afford to commission custom ones, but I'm already "over budget" with the CGs and such that I'm buying. But I'll experiment and play around with them a bit. If nothing else, I may at least be able to re-color them in such a way that they're consistent.....but it will take a looooooong time to do.

On the topic of backgrounds, the next thing I did was to add little flourishes to the backgrounds, so every few seconds, you'll see some flowers, leaves, or snowflakes (depending on what season it is) being blown around, assuming you're somewhere outside. It's not a big deal or anything, but like the little sprite animations, it just helps to make an otherwise boring static screen a little more exciting. It also increases the overall file size, though, so I may take that feature out for the special download for slow connections.

Finally, I mostly rewrote my "morning after" scene to make it more serious and to show a bit more of Zuleika's frustration by that point (though it still isn't enough, I don't think, but the point of this scene is to introduce choices, so substantial dialogue is a bit lacking on purpose). Before, like in the original, it was a fairly light-hearted scene that showed the sort of antagonistic relationship Zuleika and Chael start out with, but...let's face it: she's been running for her life in the rain all night long, and that's after finding the man who was practically her father lying dead in a pool of blood, so she's not going to be a happy camper. But then again, she's also the kind of person who won't let anyone else see her sad or upset, so don't expect to see her outwardly mourning for her master.

As a side note, I've decided that the demo will be kind of separate from the game, but will still tie in and fit within the overall game (like a DLC, hehe). Specifically, it will take place the day before/day of Osirus' death, so you'll kind of get to see how she got to where she is at the start of the actual game. I'm not sure how long it will be, but it'll help to set up the game and will showcase some of its features...mainly the exploration system that I have yet to develop, haha.

Anyway, I expect that tomorrow will also be very productive. :) Sunday...probably not so much, since I have a bunch of schoolwork I need to work on instead. But we'll see.