First post-releasing-the-demo post! Woo!

There's so many things I can talk about with what I discovered through trying to improve things, begin coding the rest of the game and drawing the sprites and backgrounds.

First is just the pro's of releasing a demo publicly, really. Seeing other people play it on twitch or in discord with me let me see some things that I had kinda... completely blinded. Probably something to do with that whole theory that the longer you stare at something you're making, the more you see flaws that aren't there and become blind to flaws that are.

Ones like a severe rework of faces being needed, because the shading just isn't working like you thought it was, or you kinda go "Hmmm, I can do better than THAT". Take, for example, the angry talking face above. On the original the facial features were layered above the red gradient, which at the time I was like, "yah that totally works" before seeing other people play and going "oh shit you can totally see the eye shadow and face lines standing out over the gradient and it looks real fuckin' weird my dude".

Another one was realising there was a 10x better way to do sprites. Originally I had a full sprite for each different face combination. This seemed okay at first, allowed me a really simple "show x at truecenter" type coding flow, but as the post-demo writing continued, a couple rewrites to earlier sections were done, the sprites started really adding up. As you can see above, those 6 sprites were of one pose with some of the many expressions. Imagine how much it added up to when you started adding the same for different poses. The filesize was getting obnoxious, the workload tedious and it just wasn't gonna be viable when I started adding different outfits and other characters who appeared later.

With the help of Kat (who has infinite patience for my random daily messages of "oh god my brain be mush and dead and im scream pls help"), we figured out a much cleaner way of doing the sprites. The one that should've been obvious to me having played so many visual novels myself that when they told me about it I was so, so embarrassed.  Even more so that I couldn't really understand the code for it at the time. It was that style of having single "base" sprites with the expressions being seperate smaller images so you can just combine them in whatever way you want. I told you, I dealt with the original sprites in such a dumbass way.

It took a while, a lot of sitting for hours rewriting stuff, but it works so much better. Downside is the declaring each sprite combination gets kind a maddening the more base sprites you have. I'm sure there's probably and even easier way to do this, but for now, it works for me. Plus side of having to go through your code and rewrite every sprite line to match the new declared-layeredimage ones is that it gives you a real good chance to just re-read your dialogue and figure out what could be better, what was badly worded and a clunky sentence.

But I suppose I should save showing the re-writes for now, don't wanna give any spoilers ;;)

Long story short, I've been busy-busy-busy. But progress has been made, things have been improved, and I'm so grateful to everyone who downloaded the demo, those who let me watch them play and those who played it on twitch. (Also sorry that you played the wrong-uploaded build, Axie, lmao. If it's any consolation it was your playthrough that made me go "hold on a second somethings wrong here". So thank you!)