The game's opening sequence is now mostly complete! :)

It contains the game's first few tutorial battles, and covers Saki's arrival in Jadewater, her discovery of the Otherworld, and obtaining her power.  Here's an early showcase of one of the game's first scenes in full, including the first tutorial fight!

Most of the cutscene is finished, barring the placeholder music and Saki's bag disappearing in some animations. The overworld bridge environment is also not entirely finished, and is missing background NPCs, proper lighting on the signs, and general polish. Still, I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out overall. It's my first time publicly showing off a finished(ish) cutscene sequence, so I hope you like it!

It feels incredibly exciting to finally see the story in a somewhat presentable state after daydreaming about it for so long. I already had most of the animations and cutscene code created from an old demo I gave to some friends a year or two back, so I've mostly spent the past few days refining the code and the script, and transferring the cutscenes to the finished versions of the maps.

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While working on these scenes, I also finally got around to making myself some basic in-game cutscene debugging tools, that let me pause scenes and move characters and props around during runtime. The most annoying part of implementing cutscenes so far has been estimating the camera and character positions correctly based on the room editor while writing out the code, so I honestly have no idea why I didn't think of creating an in-game way to test them sooner. Hopefully it should makes things a lot smoother.

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Another major help while working on these scenes was that I finally cracked and got myself a second monitor. I bought a very old spare monitor from a thrift store for five dollars ages ago with the intent to use it as a second one while drawing, but ended up getting annoyed with how much desk space it took up and how different it felt than what I was used to, so I quickly abandoned the idea. After years of stubbornly refusing to give it a second chance, however, I've finally realized that the convenience and quality of life that having a second screen brings to coding a game is unmatched. I feel like a fool for not doing this sooner.

(...Please don't laugh at the resolution.)

Thanks for reading! | - HSTopaz