Hello and happy December to you all! I have great news!
Development is back in full swing! I didn't get any commissions this month and so the past two weeks has been all Fluff Crush all the time!
So what have I been up to in that time? Pretty much all coding. I've got more placeholder sprites created. Alice, Gunther, and Pax are almost completely done. The big emotions are there, but some more transitional expressions still need to be finalized. Eli is being worked on today and the remainder of this week and, since his first day encounter is relatively short, hopefully I can have his placeholders completely finished in a short amount of time.
On top of all this, though, I've also implemented almost all of the demo story. All I need to do is finish the tail-end of the Pax introduction, put in ALL of Eli's introduction, finish the second half of Gunther's introduction, and then the dialogue and narration for the end of the day. It sounds like a lot but most of the heavy lifting has all been completed already. I finished finessing the code for the texting mechanic so everything lines up again and I've figured out a function to have Pax's pronouns randomized as well as a menu for the player to select which pronouns they'd prefer to refer to Pax as for the game (including the random ones). I'm very proud of it. I've also decided that, to keep the early workload rather easy, I'm only going to be implementing Alice, Gunther, Pax, and Eli in the demo. So that means that you'll have to stick around for the full game to meet Ash and Lily.
So what's next? As I said previously, I need to finish up some sprites and implement the remaining story elements. I also still need to make the map for the location selection mechanic but with only one location to worry about at the moment, that will be easy enough. The biggest hurdle there is figuring out an aesthetically pleasing layout for the town that also makes sense. Those are the biggest items next in line and I'm hoping to have them all done by the beginning of January. Holiday season makes things a bit difficult to work around but I think I can do it! Then after that it's just polish!
I'm so happy to be working on Fluff Crush again and I'm eager to show you all the progress I'll continue to make along the way!