June 2021 Update!

Hey people!

How is it going, I'm fine but this month I had a disaster struck me, you see, my tablet (Surface pro 4) that I use for drawing was doing weird stuff for months, always needed to be connected to power and after 2 hours of work it went a little crazy, was overheating and the screen really made weird stuff making it impossible to use.

I was still using it here and there when I really needed it to draw big stuff, like the backgrounds or character pieces. But last week it went full crazy, no 2 hours of use even, just doing its thing on turn on. So I sent it to a repair shop hoping they can fix it, if not it will be like 650€ to change it for a new model from microsoft (at least I would save something compared to buying a new one).

Oof

did a dance for Rynn, took me a while but I think it looks cute, still I think I will put another simplier one.

Started on some story in ACT 1 where Rynn got rescued by kthani.

I will make Rynn to wear rags instead of her normal equippment so the first game quest will be getting them back.

This made me redo some stuff, like how the sprites of the player is handled, inlcuding the portrait, now there is a stored state machine that handles all that, so I dont have to get preoccupied on messing up the sprite selection and everything is in one place.

Before, Rynn was 2 objects (well still is 2 objects) One for the prologue where her abilites are limited and she only uses the sword and the normal player object that can be anything i wanted.

This also made me think of a cool concept, where I can change Rynn's clothes for rewards ingame, or even maybe put some new tier reward for Patrons where they can decide a costume to wear? idk, I'm still thinking of it.

Could be cool.

Also I started working on the new attack chain combo, this will have a 3 combo chain, and tho it took me a while I got a "procedural" (ugly word) combo, so i can add more attacks after.

I don't know if these attacks are too quick, but well they are the same speed as the sword ones so gameplay first I suppose, not like I want the game to play slower.

I started also to play with the weather engine I developed (the snow was part of) and put a fog weather effect, still wip (I'm not happy with the color because looks like dust) the forest is impregnated in an ochre coloured fog.

I think maybe the fog having a more orange/yellow color could work?

The last thing I worked this month was the Tile transparency system. I wanted this to work much earlier because all the games have secret treasure rooms, cool hidden areas or even houses/buildings that don't require to use a door transition.

As you see I had a graphic's glitch with that. The tiles had black pixels where they were supposed to be transparent.

The issue is that somehow in Gamemaker studio 2 this looks very weird, and the method I found was for gms1.4 and converting that to gms2 was very taxing on performance (looking constantly for every tile if it needs to be transparent or not), but turns out there was a function that was easier to do just that dealt with shaders, and I had to write a shader for that (idk shader coding is scary) It was a simple one but still for my coding level shaders are like a black box. 

In the end it work flawlessly (hurray!)

As a last thing, I did change a bit how the patreon rewards work, and i got a new one up and running!

All my patrons deseve my love! really any ammount helps I just want to archive my dream of being a game dev and tell cool stories. And all those people are helping me do it!

On closing thoughts:

-I need revamp of the dialogue code, idk it seems something minor but when I was working on a birthday present (Happy birthday again Minirop!) I noticed an issue with the portraits in the dialogue, I made them modular so I can change the expressions on the characters, but I realized the system didn't allow expressions when talking, or even Idle ones when not talking for the mouths.

-Still working on tiles for the forest, and I fear when I have to do the decorations, I am very bad at that part of pixel art and I always get stuck thinking what stuff could be used for decorations.

-My tablet is busted so no big drawings for the time being until I get it back (I'm bad at mouse drawing pixel art). It's sad because another patron got the NPC reward, and we started discussing the character, and it's a really awesome one, I can't wait to start drawing her!

Cheers luvs!