Development Update - 005

Greetings! Salutations! Hello!

As of today, we are on our fifth Dev Update. It's been 18 days since I've released the first Chapter and 35 since the Bughunt version. It actually took me a while to make that Chapter, but that's because I left it alone for a while and tried working on other things. Things have drastically changed in that sense, since I know you guys are waiting for this one. So I've been working almost nonstop. 

I still take about 3 hours a day to enjoy a beverage and watch a movie or something, just to keep myself from going insane. 

Wake up, Neo...

The Matrix has you...

Follow the white rabbit.

Anyways, lots of progress is being made. It's super hard for me not to spoil everything because I get excited when everything comes together. However, I did have someone message me saying that I'm not doing the movie justice and that my work is extremely low-tier. Hopefully I can clear up some things and get some input on them as well.

Concepts

Okay, so I rewatched the first movie to get some more ideas. I have 100% decided that I will be making more unique sprites/models. For example, the first Chapter showed Wing Wu and Tigress. But they were both from the side. I most likely will try to make a forward facing version of characters, that way things seem less static and more immersive. I'm also going to implement a day and night system which will change all the textures to reflect the time of day. The only thing that won't be affected (to my understanding at least) by this is the UI elements (the player image and the HUD).

Coding

I actually improved on my programming skills for this one. In programming, we have things called functions that make doing complex actions as easy as one line of code, sometimes with a custom parameter. Usually it looks like "setTime("day")" or something along those lines. Anyways, I figured out how to create functions in Python, so I won't have to use as much repetitive code just to do one thing. Currently I have already created a function to change the time of day. This will come in handy whenever I need to update all the sprites to reflect the time (which you will see below).

Art

I must admit, being told that I wasn't doing the movie justice and having someone say my work is low-tier is a tad annoying. But I prefer to just let my actions speak for itself:

Here is a preview of the Player's room in the Student Barracks. I used the movie to try to stay as screen accurate as possible. I still need to fix the "windows" on the left. The top is messed up and you can see brush strokes behind the color. Aside from that, I'm relatively happy with the result.

If you remember from the second Development Update, I included the drawing used for this picture. I finally scanned the picture and colored it. I also remembered that Tigress' eyes weren't affected by the darkness, so I implemented that as well. Also, by the dialogue, you can tell that this is the beginning to the good side's second chapter. I personally am not a fan of spoilers, but I figured I should at least show some sort of results after getting that message.

Here is a sample of the night and day versions of a character. Nothing too crazy, but fun to look at nonetheless.

Miscellaneous

I'm curious, should I make the Development Updates public after a specific amount of time or should I keep them Patron locked? I'm personally indifferent about it, so whatever sounds good to you guys is fine with me.

Also, I previously said I was probably going to enter The-Killer-WC's Unit Wolf contest. Winner gets a free single character colored commission from him. If I win, I'll simply let you guys decide on something (there's currently only 3 patrons, so I figure we can all agree on something) and I'll tell him the idea.

Probably going to start working on the panty designs soon, so be on the look out for that.