Don't Toy With MeTen thousand downloads! This is definitely too big of a milestone to go unmentioned here so I just wanted to take the time to say thank you to everyone who played a part in this! People who downloaded the game, Let's Players and their viewers, people who told their friends about the game or recommended it to others or drew fanart or made fan pages. All of you made the game such a big success! It makes me so happy to see something I made being enjoyed like this. I can only hope that you guys will enjoy my next game just as much. ❤ I'd also like to thank everyone who has paid for the game and who has contributed toward the Queer Games Bundle. Not only is it exciting to be able to sell copies of something I made, this money helps toward future projects, including In Your Nature. In Your Nature: Writing and GUIWritingThis week's progress comes with a chunky 9,659 words added to drafting the script. The Common Route is just about entirely written, only needing some small additions to improve the flow and the rest of that writing went into the beginning of Oleander's route. I didn't hit the 25k mark for the total script as I had hoped to (just 1.3k away now!) but I did manage to write more days than not this week and the near completion of the Common Route means something else. I now have enough written to start focusing on visual assets I'll need for the demo. Right now I'm considering making the demo the majority of the Common Route. This will include the prologue, scenes introducing all major characters, and the inciting incident of the story, but without going into the point where you choose between characters to follow. Pre-editting, what I have for that section of the story amounts to about 16k words (some of which is optional reading depending on choices). So, comparable to the full length of Don't Toy With Me. It might be too long for a demo? I'll have to ask around other VN devs who have put out demos before I make up my mind on this. But I'd really like for you guys to have something playable that gets you invested in the story! Art AssetsI've gotten back to work on my sprites, though I'm trying to treat them a little more economically rather than just diving headfirst in. I have a big spreadsheet full of assets to keep track of what I need and while I do want to include more art than less, right now my goal is for each of the companion characters to have two poses and one outfit, plus little outerwear details like Pickles' apron which can be removed. This lets me focus on getting the most default aspects of the sprites nice and polished rather than scattering to try to hurry and do 12 sprites plus expressions plus alternate outfits and etc. etc. etc. GUI and othersI'm also working on the GUI as mentioned. This was a pretty funny bug I ran into last night. As it turned out, I had two conflicting alignment statements for the text box so when it was the narrator speaking, it would slowly edge its way off screen. I solved it before I went to bed but it really stumped me for a while haha. Right now this is how the regular GUI is looking. Right now my plans include making Fawn's side portrait a little larger, perhaps brightening up the quick menu buttons so they're easier to read. I have it designed right now with playing fullscreen in mind, and I want to include text scaling for accessibility, but the default selections should at least be comfortable for most people. So it's lots of fiddling with and adjusting things.
Other than that, I do have plans to start shopping around for a composer for the game's main theme. The money from Don't Toy With Me's sales and the Queer Games Bundle are what allows me to start considering this. Though a full sound track is still a long ways away. I might start a Patreon some time after the demo is complete in order to afford these other aspects of the game. If anyone is a patron for other VN devs or similarly narrative focused indie devs at the moment, feel free to let me know what kind of things you like to see on offer! It helps to know these kinds of things before I start solidifying any plans. That's all I've got for today! Thanks for reading as usual and I'll see you next Devlog Day! -Karma
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First thing's first, what everybody wants to hear. The android build is finally here! I already wrote a little devlog about this in the middle of the night when I uploaded the new build but I'll recap it here so I don't have to bounce everybody back and forth between websites haha.
This isn't the happy ending update but it is one I know quite a few people wanted, whether for one or all of these things, so I hope it's well received!
If you've been on the itchio homepage recently you may already know this other news.
Queer Games Bundle
Don't Toy With Me is part of the Queer Games Bundle and shows up on the front page as one of the thumbnails for the Pay What You Can Edition! The bundle's purpose is to split profits between many queer devs to support their continued work. I encourage you to check out either version to support queer devs and see all of the other cool games being made out there!
In Your Nature
I haven't been available for much lately due to a lot of busy irl plans this past month, but I have been doing my usual scheming as well as starting on In Your Nature's GUI. Seeing how things went with altering Don't Toy With Me, I'm going into this design with several things in mind.
Here's a look at what I've got so far from today. The background here is one of the default "panorama" backgrounds included with Clip Studio Paint but it's here to help me see how the boxes look over busier graphics rather than just a plain background.
The Q.Save and Q.Load button are ones I haven't figured out how to fit in the sliding menu. There's still a chance I'll need to downsize things so the text box doesn't cover up so much of the screen. Maybe the dropdown menu will only be for the android version? Much to consider! If you have strong feelings about any of this, feel free to comment here on the blog or reply to a post on my dev twitter when I post there! I'm always happy to get feedback on things and I want my visual novels to be easy to read.
Keychains and printing stuff
Unrelated to game development, but still a little relevant to things I've been making. My keychains finally arrived last week!
The experience was helpful in learning about making merch! The colors are very close to my initial art, though I wish I had chosen to make the color frost on the background a lighter shade. I hadn't realized how opaque it would be when preparing the files for the printing service. I'll be sure to keep this in mind if I order something of this type again. I'm happy with the quality though and will be comfortable making bigger orders later on.
I'd like to eventually order Don't Toy With Me keychains so this was important to know. Plus, I'll keep what I learned in mind for the designs I want to make for RedBubble. Now that I'm not hosting any company or visiting away from home or too sick to do anything, I'm hoping to kick my art production back into high gear! We'll see if I actually manage it, haha. So where have you been?
If you're just here for game updates, you can stop reading here. I just figure since I've been so MIA, it's worth mentioning what I've been up to outside of game development. After all, the Android update should not have taken me an entire month. People following my art twitter might have already known that at the start of last month, I was away on a trip (or at least some of that week). My best friend of many years flew halfway across the country to stay with me! We spent a couple days in Vegas and had a blast then the rest of the week at my place.
After seeing her off, I was sick for a bit as I complained about on Twitter. No, not with Covid, and thank goodness she didn't catch what I had. So I was essentially wiped out for that week.
A week-ish of rest after that because the illness kicked my ass and I knew I had another trip coming up. I do basically nothing most of the time so this was a lot of activity for a shut in like me, haha. But I would be going at the end of the month/beginning of this month to stay with a different set of friends which was also fun. Our main target was Monsterpalooza. We went for a single day after an eventful week of visiting and had a lot of fun! But I'll be honest in saying I'm disappointed they didn't take as many Covid precautions as their website implied. I wasn't asked for my vaccine card and many people were not wearing masks despite it supposedly being a masks required event. I'm feeling okay so hopefully me masking up and being boosted was enough to counteract that. And on the bright side, I met a lot of internet friends and got some cool artist con swag.
I did still try to work on things while I was away, even drawing the RIP Huxley CG on my friend's laptop. But I had to wait until I got home to export anything since setting up the Android exporting in Renpy is a little more complicated than exporting regular VNs. I took a day to recharge before finally finishing the last of my work on the update and releasing it at like midnight last night when I was fairly sure nothing was wrong with it. (Please nothing be wrong with it!!! I did a lot of testing!)
But yeah, I had a ton of fun finally meeting people I'd been friends with for years in person as well as getting some new experiences under my belt. These are things I've never had the opportunity to do in the past so it's all been very new for me. I'm feeling recharged and eager to create! Keep an eye out for further updates on my projects, and see you again next blog day! -Karma |
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