v0.6 Progress Log 4

This progress log took a bit longer to post than I would've liked to, but hey, here it is!

First, the issues with the shaders. Basically the water shader was not getting along with the sprite shader due to both of them having transparency, after many attempts trying to make it work, I decided to just get rid of the transparency of the sprites in order to move on from dealing with shaders. After all, the transparency on the sprites was really only needed for one of the new outfits, and I found a way to gimmick the transparency on the outfit which makes it so it looks transparent without it actually having transparency, it's obviously not as good as having actual transparency on it, but it works. Anyhow, there were a few other issues with the shaders, but most have been solved and now the sprites and the water are getting along well again. 

Now, as mentioned in the previous log, adding transparency to the sprites was the main reason everything shader related had to be updated, and yes, after having to remove the transparency from the sprites, all of the upgrades to the shaders did become sort of pointless. It was a waste of an important amount of time, but I did learn many things, the new shader do look better in a lot of cases, and the game is now more flexible with a lot of visual stuff because of the upgrading and the new shaders, so I guess that's nice. (One of the screenshots above shows the new shaders working as intended.)

As a brief continuation from the world sprite stuff I mentioned in the last log, Hana's world sprite now reflects some changes to her appearance (Ex. As you can see in the screenshot above, Hana will now wear her lifeguard cap whenever she works at the pool). This feature resulted in a lot of new sprite sheets which unfortunately could not be compressed due to a few rookie mistakes I did early in the game's development. This lead to roughly half of the game's file size being nothing but sprite sheets. Anyhow, went ahead and fixed this. A bit tedious, but now the game's file size is around half of what it used to be.

Other than those 2 things, the main thing I've been working on is the level up events for level up 2, 3, and 4. They are quite different from the level up events for level 0 and 1. These new events have been a bit interesting, and time consuming, especially Level 2 and 4's level up events, those two are requiring a lot of unique CGs for some one-off situations that happen within them. Having this many new CGs for these events has turned out to be a bit time consuming, but worth it.

The three level up events also turned out to be looooong, with lots of dialogue, developments for Hana, and some insight into various things. I'm also trying out some new stuff in them, so there's a bit of trial and error going on. Due to this and the sheer amount of CGs needed for them, I don't really know when I'll be done with them. 

The other main thing I've been working on has been the set of events with Sebas and Nube, finally. These are for the most part fairly simple and straightforward routines that work as little post-level up events. Once Hana levels up, the next day she'll visit Sebas at the Infirmary, chat about stuff and keep him updated as she promised she would. These events are very calm with nothing lewd happening in them, they mostly just give insight into stuff. Nothing major happens in them, unless...

Other than that there has been work on various other normal events, but I'll save the details for the next log.

I'm looking into writing another post this month about release dates and stuff about the remaining development of the game as a whole, as opposed to update focused talk. 

Anyhow, that'll be it for now. Thank you for supporting the development of Hana's Exposure!