Progress Log (v0.5)

Alright, it's been a while since the last time I made a proper progress log, so here it is with a small sneak peak pic of the daycycle system and a few other features which I'll get into in this post.

For starters, points of interest are being revamped into their final version. The layouts have remained the same for the most part. However, there are no longer any placeholders, and everything just looks a lot better due to the tools available in blender.

Revamping the POIs has been somewhat time consuming due to all of the unique assets that have been made for each POI, and as of now the PUB and Clothing Shop have been completely revamped. What's left is to finish the revamp of the Bathhouse, Inn and Pool. Fortunately, those remaining POIs don't really require as many unique assets as the PUB and Clothing shop, so it shouldn't take more than a week or two to wrap them all up.

While we are talking about improving stuff, the town has seen some love as well with slightly higher poly counts for the trees, new textures for them as well, and new bushes spread throughout the town in order to make it feel more alive. The town improvements are not done yet, so in the update it'll probably look a little different from the screenshot above.

Now there's the daycycle system, and there's a decent bit to it, so bear with me for a bit. For starters, there's 5 different times of the day in-game, dawn, noon, afternoon, dusk, and night. Hana wakes up  at dawn, and everytime she starts an activity like working or using a POI, daytime moves on to the next stage. Which means that Hana is be able to do a total of 4 activities before it turns into night, at that point Hana has to go to sleep and continue the next day at dawn. Now, that's the gist of how it works, however, there's a lot of things being added, overhauled or tweaked in order to allow the daycycle system to really shine.

For starters, the lighting has changed from Baked to Realtime, which has good and bad points. Realtime takes a bigger hit on performance, and it tends to not look as good as baked lighting. However, the good thing of it being Realtime is that lighting can be changed at runtime without any problem, while baked lighting doesn't allow any changes.

And with the lighting following the path, color, and intensity of the sun and moon, Realtime lighting is a must.

Another good thing about Realtime lighting is that we can now have some realtime shadows, now, keep in mind that Hana and the NPCs are 2D characters, not 3D characters, and as such they typically wouldn't cast shadows or be affected by lights, however, with a few gimmicks that I'm adding, Hana and NPC are now able to cast shadows and be affected by light despite being 2D characters in a 3D world.

Another fun part of the daycycle system is that now NPC's will only be available at certain times of the day depending on the POI they are at. PUB NPCs will tend to appear when it's dusk or nighttime, Bathhouse NPCs at dawn and dusk, Pool NPCs at noon, etc. This helps the daycyle feel real, and overall it's just a nice addition for immersion purposes.

Lastly, 5 new gorgeous skyboxes have been made, and added  (the dawn skybox can be seen a the screenshot above)  that will change as the daytime changes. They look amazing.

Now, when it comes to the prologue, it was overhauled a bit as there were some areas that I wasn't entirely happy about. The idea is still the same, but a lot of pieces of dialogue were tweaked or removed in order for it to be a bit shorter and easier to follow.

3 out of the 4 CGs included in the prologue have been completed, and again, all that's left to do when it comes to the prologue is to code the routine. However, I've been really busy with the POI revamps and the daycyle stuff, so it'll likely be 2 or 3 more weeks before I get to coding it.

Another thing is that from v0.5 onwards some dialogues and interactions will have chibi CGs instead of normal dialogue, as CGs are able to convey movement, and normal dialogue scenes really can't do that. 3 out of the 4 CGs in the prologue are chibi CGs, so look forward to the movements and fun interactions they allow!

Work is starting on fixing that one bug at the bathhouse that sometimes hardlocks the player when choosing whether to work or not. For better or for worse to fix that glitch I'm deleting and writing from scratch a decent bit of the script as it's very outdated and basic, and fixing it would probably end up causing even more problems in the future, so yeah, it'll be written from scratch in order to avoid bugs related to that old script in the future.

So long as the testing and writing of that script doesn't go terribly wrong, the update should be out this month, so look forward to it!

That seems to be it for now. However, I'm probably forgetting some stuff as I'm incredibly tired and I'm writting this on auto-pilot, so apologies for that.

Anyway, I'll be back really soon with the third character reveal and more news!

Thank you for supporting the development of Hana's Exposure!