Oracle-Sphinx 

YAY!!!

From the one-sided fight with Blender, I emerged victorious and made lineart imitation which changes shape depending on camera angle.

Look how cool it is:

I didn't record looking up and down, but it works as intended too. Awesome.

It creates some artefacts here and there though, but fixing something this small on a still render is easy enough, and I don't need animations anyway (:

I'm a little… frustrated, to say the least.

I’m trying to get the hang of nodes in Blender so I can create the render I want, but as of now it's a mixed success.

The best I've managed to achieve so far:

You might be wondering, "what's wrong with this?"

Visually everything looks fine - this is pretty much what I was trying to achieve. But here's the thing: I need the rendering of the internal lines and where they break off to depend on the camera position.

And that’s where the problems start. In fact, they’re so bad that when I asked GPT about how to do this, since I've never worked with nodes and don't really understand what to combine with what to get the desired result, it said: “Are you sure that's what you need? Absolutely sure? Maybe we should just do something simpler?”

But I don't want something simpler, I want it exactly as I envisioned it :D

Anyway, I'm taking a break for the weekend, then I'll tinker with it some more. If it still doesn't work out, I'll manually tweak the parameters of some nodes for different angles.

Learning Blender. My brain resists so much, but the process is going step by step (:

I decided that I should start from the beginning and not get ahead of myself, so for now I make a room interior for the intro and work with primitives - in principle, most of the furniture are just boxes of different size. But when I'll get to smaller stuff, that's when it might become tough. I'm glancing on free assets, since making a keyboard or some toys/figurines on shelves doesn't seem very fun and worth the time I'll have to put there. But we'll see.

Yesterday played around with lighting a little:

Not much to share, I had a break :D

But first thing first: before the break I finished main menu! My friends are joking I made in such a way that there's no need to make everything else😁

 Music: "Willow and the Light" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

I fixed the animation delay, rotation of the crystal, added more prominent chain pull and also the glow when a button hovered (:

Also added music (it was a pain to make a loop from the track I liked, I'm so grateful to kind people who make tutorials for such noobs as myself).

Posts are delayed again, but I'm alive and working :D

Rn I'm making UI for game menus and main menu. It's still quite hard without any designing skills, and as usual there are some unexpected difficulties along the way (:

Save-load menu is supposed to look like this for now, but I decided to put it aside for the moment and think some more. In the meantime I'm gonna make preferences menu, luckily I drew it already for The Hunt, though didn't implement it there - basically I just need to change the background and slice everything. And add it into the game, of course (:

Main menu had a different kind of trouble for me. I made a crystal that pointed onto hovered button without any physics, leaving polishing for later. But I got pushed in a Ren'Py chat which resulted in adding swing physics, and I decided to finish it in Live2D by adding some live to the chain, making crystal rotate around itself slightly and distorting reflections. But because of the animation cycles it seams in a wrong way.

Just after I wrote that I have to give up on the feature, I managed to defeat it :D

My idea with the new property for the original viewport via patch worked (I'll be honest here, I wouldn't be able to make it without AI which a friend recommended to me as good for coding one). After a few hours of battle with bugs the first version of patch caused it worked as intended.

Marvelous.

Now I'll go get some sleep ((x

This week I did what I shouldn't have done - spent too much time on the feature I mentioned battling with in my previous post.

And I understand that's irrational :D

But my brain got hooked up on it and doesn't let go, even though it's time to either give up on keeping text scroll on bottom, or to move the whole window from top of the screen to bottom. But I really want to make it work as intended, and such a sudden engine restiction is frustrating!

So I've spent time asking friends, strangers and Ai about that. I even looked into how viewport is coded into Ren'Py in the first place, and found two(!) lines that have to be changed to make it work. But I can't edit it right there, it's not the right way to do it. So I need to make a new property for the viewport to toggle it's behavior, but implementing something like that goes way out my knowledge. AI's solutions don't work too, and I can't work with them due to lack of my own skill.

Well, probably it's really time to at least put this feature aside for now and get back to it later, and decide if I'll be able to make it or will have to give up on it then.

Although, of course, there’s a crazy idea to ask about this the Ren'Py developer himself...

It seems I got up speed again :D

I make HUD bit by bit: inventory is fully finished, skin for notes and to-do list is ready, adding necessary functionality for the list (it will be transferred to the notes later too + notes will need an input field). Overall everything works, but I have a big problem I can't solve for two days already.

To Do/Notes window has three states: minimized, half-expanded and fully expanded. All of that smoothly moves up or down over 0.5 secons.

All of that but text.

The idea was for the window to keep text position the way that text moves with the window without resetting scroll. Let's say in fully expanded mode you can see tasks from #6 to #10. You half-minimize it and see only task #10 if it's four lines long, or tasks #9 and #10 if they're one-two lines long each. And vice versa, what you see in the small window will be at the bottom of the big one. 

Alas :D

For now either scroll abruptly jumps to the very bottom and then text smoothly moves, or the text smoothly moves and then scroll position resets and recalculating it back is also abrupy, or everything just jumps, without smooth movement at all.

Looks bad.

It seems I forgot to translate posts from the last couple of weeks😅

This week was rich on IRL stuff, but the game got some attention too (:

Plan for the nearest future:

Also I need to finish visuals, but I'll get to that later.

See you later (:

Hi! Today I’ve got a bit of a forced detour, but it’s important for development.

I moved the written dialogues into Ren’Py and I’m figuring out how to make nice custom speech bubbles for the lines, because you can’t just go with simple ellipse ones with this engine — you have to get a bit creative there. But that’s nothing new (:

And then the detour begins: since a lot of mobile internet providers use whitelists, and now there’s news that wired connections might start doing the same, I’ve been thinking about what I’m supposed to do with my project under those conditions.

The question of where to upload the finished game if Steam isn’t an option is still pretty far off. But where to post devlogs and, more importantly, where to look up coding tips and visual software guides — those are much more pressing concerns.

For now, the devlog will continue here, but since Boosty, as far as I know, isn’t on any whitelist, I need to consider other options. Right now I’m leaning toward VK, even though the whole idea feels pretty hopeless. But maybe I’m wrong. I need to think about it some more.

As for the coding side, I saved the manual, a few free plugins, and all the snippets I’ve collected while working with Ren’Py. The archive isn’t very big, but it should at least cover some of the “uh, how do I even do this?” kind of questions. I’ll have to rely on my brain more and spend extra time figuring things out, but well (:

It’s a bit more complicated with Live2D and Blender resources, since most of it is video. I’ve saved some things, but saving everything “just in case” isn’t really possible — I have no idea what problems I’ll run into (and where I’d even store all that). Still, at least it’s something.

We’ll see how it goes.