​A lot of work has been done to hmSpirit – which is now henceforth labeled as “FH” in the dev diaries.I have a ideal final name picked out, so this is the abbreviation of that! 

Creative-front

First and foremost, I have been actively trying to recruit the work of lovely independent artists in game-dev communities to help make some character concepts and sprite art. I have a commission underway right now for the character Miyuki who I am actively testing and building game functionality with. The post is still up, and I am still interested in artists – especially sprite focused with tileset experience. If that’s you, ring me! 

I have just finally started a TOUCH of writing. Right now, I am in the trenches of writing the dialogue for the prologue/opening scene of the game. While I don’t plan to slack on the writing, the benefit of a game that will be 50% hentai is that the writing does not need to end up profound or anything – I love profound stories, and plan to someday make serious games utilizing them, but for now, I am enjoying being simplistic and funny with the characters and world building.

I am not completely inept to art! I have spent a couple of hours concepting the actual in-game maps for when that endeavor is ready:

​This concept art is about -I dunno – 45% done? The world won’t be massive by any stretch of the word, but it will be large enough to feel like a fully fleshed out farm sim.

Boring technical stuff

Today, I spent a couple hours on a few things. Firstly, documenting annotation for the scripting so we don’t lose the plot when moving dialogue from script files into their JSON structures. That was small fluff but important. After that, I had worked on updating a bit of the state machines and systems in the project so far, as I am trying to get the interactions and dialogue system really nailed in before anything else. This ended up leading me to realize that Gamemaker does NOT include sprites or assets if they are not referenced anywhere in the code or other instances like rooms. So, I set up a singleton SpriteManager which meant stopping what I was doing, and refactoring how I create character objects and set sprites.

Since the game will change sprite visuals per season, this helps with that. But it also helps with what my main goal of the day was: prototyping the flow of the H-action system. You will see it in the video below, but the idea is essentially you can get to a point with eligible characters to have lewd interactions with them (gated by AP or Action Points, of course). As such, I need to ensure that the dialogue JSON also was able to tell my DialogueManager when we need to change the character’s sprite: whether it be a simple expression change, or change to something like “Miyuki_showBra_embarrassed” or “Miyuki_paizuri_one.” So, I got that wired up.

Some other changes since dev diary 2: the GUI and resolution settings of the game have been re-thought and are now handled with my GameInstance object on load to be consistent across the board. Also, the last update did not show the SocialMenu – the radial wheel of options to choose from for your social (or perverted) interactions. You can see everything in the footage below:

Some other things I have been chipping away at:

• setting up the JSON for all crops, seeds, and tools
• planning out the rest of the game items, such as flowers, key items, and so on
• updating project documentation
• budgeting for the project (keep in mind, this is like a hobby’s worth of savings right now 🙂 )

Peace peace~

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