Hello! It's already the 24th...! The month has felt very fast for me...

My work on SBH over the past few weeks has been more of the same for the most part--a lot of menial spritework and cutscene code--so this is probably going to be a short post covering a few random noteworthy topics.

Story Progress

I've managed to make significant progress on the first chapter's cutscenes and battles, so here are a few screenshots and a clip from that:

It feels a little like I'm trying to animate an action movie in RPG Maker sometimes, but I'm happy with how they look so far. :)

Downtown Map

I've also managed to confront and create a gameplay-friendly draft of the 'Downtown' area mentioned in the previous post. Here's the before and after:

It's mostly generic placeholder buildings at the moment, barring the ones with unique designs, but I'll eventually get around to replacing them with more interesting and colorfully designed ones. I'd prefer to wait until I have some more of the game's sandbox-y side content implemented and fleshed out before I start doing that so I can design buildings that accommodate certain sidestories or minigames.

Animation Debug Tool

I also made myself another small, janky debug tool--this time for testing out different cutscene and battle animations in-game!

Most animations in SBH work on a simple 'event' system that triggers certain 'events' like sound effects or pauses at certain frames of animation. Previously whenever I'd want to tinker with animations it'd involve recompiling the entire game every time to adjust for changes in the event code, which was very annoying. This debug mode, however, just lets me load animation code as plain text from the clipboard, and converts it into the correct format to be used as code, allowing me to test out minor changes very quickly during runtime.

It probably isn't that exciting to anyone except me, but it's been a massive improvement to my workflow.

Conclusion

That's about all for now. I've been talking a lot more about graphic design than game design lately. Hopefully I'll have something more exciting to show off in the next post...

If you want to read more, I've also finally made a website character page for Leon, which you can check out here.

Thanks for reading! | - HSTopaz

(Cross-posted from the website.)