Travel System

This weekend, I made great progress on town navigation and the travel system. You can now travel to any location on the map flawlessly, and each location is equipped with the proper facilities.

I actually put a lot of thought into what towns would have which of the facilities (because only the capital of each province has all six). All of them have at least a shop and an inn (though the shop items may vary depending on where you are), but for the rest, I had to do a bit of thinking about the provinces themselves - what makes them unique, how religious they are, etc. I might have mentioned that I'd been thinking about that before, but this is where that stuff starts to come into play.

Travel times have also been fully incorporated, which means that the further from your current location you're trying to go, the longer it will take to get there. When you choose a destination on the map, a pop-up will tell you how many days it will take to travel and ask for a confirmation, so if you decide you don't want to go there after seeing how long it'll take, you can cancel. The time component will probably be largely unimportant, but it may come into play with certain quests...none of the major plot quests, so it wouldn't ruin the entire game if you failed to make it in time, but perhaps some companion quests where it might hurt your relationship if you put it off for too long.

There will probably also be other things that will be related to the time factor, namely birthdays. If you give one of your companions a gift on or around their birthday (within a couple weeks), you'll get extra affection with them. On your birthday, if you have enough affection, they'll give you a gift. This will be how you receive the gift accessories mentioned in a previous post.

Anyway...point is, I did good stuff this weekend. If I can work out the background situation and do some writing and finish up the town navigation stuff (i.e. coding the individual locations), I may be ready to release a new, more substantial beta pretty soon. Yay. :)

P.S.: I finished the maid's sprite and named her Ange (might change to Angee later...we'll see).

Sprites

I mentioned in my last post that I decided to try to make sprites for all the minor characters who need to be represented on screen.

Well, I've been working on that some more today. I finished Lilah's sprite, and also started on a sprite for Zuleika's maid back at the castle. I haven't thought of a name for her yet (but with that red hair, I can't help but think "Molly"), but she's Zuleika's main servant - the one who prepares her clothes, cleans her room, and, most importantly, keeps her company during those long, lonely days locked in her tower. So, by that, you can already gather that they'll have more of a relationship than just a lady-servant one. She's kind of ugly, I know, but hey...not everyone can be stick-thin with perfect features like Lilah here.

So Lazy...

Seriously, I've done...like...nothing. :/

Well, okay...a couple days back, I went through and tried to flesh out the City of Jarconia arc. As I was doing so, I quickly realized that I'm going to need a lot more sprites for various characters that show up and talk...but I'm not willing to wait 2 years or whatever to get more finished lineart, nor am I willing to fork over the cash. That means either using silhouettes (which didn't work very well for me in the past), not using any sprite and just have them speaking from off-screen (which is pretty lame and boring), or *gasp* making my own sprites.

I have attempted to do just that by piecing together various things and then somehow making it look decent. Here is the first one I've done this way (flat color only, no shading yet) - a woman named Lilah who plays a pretty large part in the Jarconia arc, since the main goal is to find her before a major conflict breaks out between the human and demon factions of the city. I'm not sure if I really succeeded in making her look good, but...at least I tried. And even if she doesn't turn out that great, it's not like she's a main character, just important enough that she at least needs to be represented on-screen.

If I can make it work, then this will help a great deal in showing what demons and elves look like in this world, as opposed to the silhouette portraits I had planned to use before. Yes, it will take a lot of work, but it'll be worth it, I think.

And on an art-related note, I still haven't figured out what to do with the backgrounds. I'm leaning towards taking photos and tweaking them to make them look more "cartoon-ish" without going through and re-drawing them all. It's not an ideal solution, but it may work until I can figure out something better.

In the meantime, here is a preview of Chael's loading screen for your viewing pleasure. :)