Developer’s plans for July -> August period

Heya! As always, here are the main points of my work this month. Yorna will receive 3 new H events and a pair of small cutscenes with monster girls. This will most likely cover all missing domi scenes and the next month can open up opportunities for mansion’s scenes.

Now, let’s talk about the new game. I’m still rigging Live2d SDK v3, though several breakthroughs happened. After all the hard work, I can play animations inside the RPG Maker’s scenes below the interface level - this allows me to make a gallery and scene logic similar to Yorna’s. A huge plus - existing logic can be used to speed up development in the future.

Also, I can display several animated objects at the same which, in theory, can allow me to make animated dialogue scenes. At this moment, I don’t know if this will be in the game but the option to do so is definitely welcome. Depending on my workload and active animators/artists this may become another feature for Cyberthing.

My main is for this month is to finish the prototype so artists could start learning Live2d and decide if they can handle the animation. This will mark the end of “Preparation phase I” and the start of “Phase II” where we’ll be working on an early alpha build.

Of course, there are other obstacles and hindrances to think about. For example, Live2d SDK v2 used pixie.js to play animations and corresponding sound effects, including synced audio. SDK v3 uses WebGL and a quick search didn’t give me any option to sync the sound with action.

Some may disregard this issue as non-important. Besides, I sort of synced the audio in Yorna, right? Well, the usual animation loop is around 20-50 frames and if the game will play exactly the same sound each second or so - you’ll quickly make a voodoo doll for me. Or mute the H sounds. Non-critical yet definitely can work for the atmosphere if done right.

While I already can load up different models and animations and play them, I do this via hard-coding resources in the loader. This may cause some issues in the long run since all of them load up at the start of the game. All animations are ready to go at any time. Great. Models eat up RAM and are stuck there until you shut down the game. Bleh.

Again, a non-critical issue but I would like to see a smart loader which can manipulate RAM based on which scenes player can trigger and unload the events which won’t be active in the foreseeable future. This will be more of an advanced feature which can be finished even after the game releases yet it would be great to have from day 1.

Plus, July will be the month where I start working on publishing EX version to Steam and Nutaku. Some players asked me about the release date but only a rough estimation is possible. Can’t say for sure if everything will go smoothly but there’s a chance you’ll be able to find Yorna on these platforms late August. No promises though, I never published anything on them.

These are the main points for July -> August period. As always, I’ll make weekly updates so stay tuned and check the news.