Map Progress

Hey!

I've managed to get two more of the game's major outdoor locations into a playable (but very unfinished) state. My intent at the moment is to get the overworld into the correct 'shape' so that I can start accurately implementing gameplay and cutscenes into them, but with a lot of finer details left out to leave room for changes and additions later on if necessary. A lot of the undecorated generic buildings you can see are just temporary placeholders.

The first location is the West Jadewater Backstreets--an older and relatively quiet street with a handful of small businesses to visit, and also where Yuri lives!

The second is Northbay, a recreational hotspot of stores and attractions only a few blocks away from the beach.

Coming up with all the unique building designs is tiring, but I find it to be a lot of fun.

With these two areas done (for now), it leaves only two more major outdoor locations to make--one of which is the gigantic 'Downtown' area that currently looks like this:

...Which I'm a little intimidated to start work on, and might put off doing for a while to avoid completely exhausting myself on map making.

Script Converter Tool & Cutscene Progress

I've also been steadily working on more of the game's early story cutscenes. I've been doing things in chronological order, and the order in which I've been making assets has been generally dictated by what the story requires, as I feel like it gives me a clear and easy to follow plan of how to approach what's otherwise a very imposing amount of work.

To help with the cutscene making, I actually used Gamemaker and a little Javascript to build myself a small 'script converter' program, that converts character dialogue written in plain text into cutscene code, effectively allowing me to directly copy and paste my script documents directly into the game!

EG. Taking the text:

"SAKI: What do you mean?
...Is there something else going on?
/Livio shrugs
LIVIO: ...No idea."

And replacing the linebreaks with a placeholder "|n" symbol using a slightly modified version of this code:

"SAKI: What do you mean?|n...Is there something else going on?|n/Livio shrugs|nLIVIO: ...No idea."

Will cause the converter program to output it as:

...Which can then be pasted directly into a cutscene! It's a little ugly, but very effective.

I still have to manually set things like dialogue portrait expressions and pauses in the textboxes, but it saves me an incredible amount of time that I'd otherwise have to spend copy and pasting every individual line of dialogue.

Thanks for reading! | - HSTopaz