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I'm almost finished doing the lineart for all of the CGs so that I'd have at least some placeholder graphics for the 'acting'.

I chucked out a lot of originally planned CGs, meaning other characters are demoted to being off-screen references.

Which means, the title "Underground Clan..." doesn't apply anymore, since the story now focuses on the main girl Triona as opposed to several people. Instead of a backstory regarding a culture, it's now one person's backstory.

I don't know what the new title should be, but I'll worry about that when the script is finalized and I don't have to change things anymore.

Also, while doing one of the CGs, I decided "what if" and drew some genitals... and was surprisingly pleased with the result, since the postures were really good. I was keeping the steamy things in check but I guess if the CGs demand the "full details" then so be it. This project is now a hardcore yaruge. (Dammit why does every idea I have turn to hentai? )

In any case, whatever the hell I'm doing with this, a finished game will come out one way or another. I'm too deep in production already.

I have no idea what this will become anymore XD... Good luck nonetheless *is in for a surprise, whatever happens*

(Dammit why does every idea I have turn to hentai? )

Because that's the way to go!

Ren wrote:

(Dammit why does every idea I have turn to hentai? )

Because that's the way to go!

*nods, with a background tabled saying "agreed XD"*

(Dammit why does every idea I have turn to hentai? )


Because that's the way to go!

Thank you Ren, for giving me a smile after a rough day!

Nothing's wrong with Hentai...it's just what you do WITH it that makes it "bad" or "corny" or *yeesh!* There's some great hentai titles out there...and about a zillion bad ones...just depends on how you use the idea

Update: 3-day weekend this week, so I'm making a lot of progress. Script will have to be severely revised because of the 'acting' (placement of images in-game once finished).

Nevertheless, I have finished all the lineart and coloring, I am currently shading using Deji's technique.

I am soooo tempted to post a nice pic but I'll save everything for the big finale release. I have less than 3 weeks before I go for Xmas break but I hope to release something before.

Thanks for your support.

Graphics: (BG, sprites) -- 100% Complete.

And what's more, all of them are sourced from a single ridiculously large PSD file! It's almost like a super doll with its many layers.

Quality should be light years ahead compared to my previous works, thanks to variable line width and new shading techniques.

New tentative title is "Yaruge Girl Triona". Game will have option for censorship, but will only be one distribution package.

Now I just have 3 weeks to rescript the game (the current one is now obsolete due to the nature of the final graphics) and compose the music.

Freeware ero original works might become my specialty at this rate ^_^.

I can't wait to see your art progress =D!~

Graphics: 100%
Music: 100%

I have been concentrating on porting the script to renpy, which is still a bit of work because of the 'acting' commands (show/hide etc.) and fitting the words in.

Nevertheless, I have compiled the complete package and *drumroll*...

The windows distro is 5.19 megabytes! Note this includes full ogg music, not midis.

The final product will only be a few kilobytes greater than that, because it's just more text and programming. But all the resources are in it. I downloaded Python 2.5 just to run jcc.py and boy did it save me 1 megabytes! I only notice that the edges tend to be grayer than usual (i.e. when using regular pngs instead of jpeg masks), but I can live with it.

I have reused a few backgrounds, but they're used just in the introduction... the core of the game is all new.

I hope to release the game next weekend.

Two things:

- What are the stats for a game of that size?

- Did you switch out DejaVuSans for another font? That's a good way to lose another few hundred k compressed.

DaFool wrote: I only notice that the edges tend to be grayer than usual (i.e. when using regular pngs instead of jpeg masks), but I can live with it.

Incidentally - I don't know how it's done specifically in this instance, so this is just wild speculation based on what I know of PNGs and JPEGs, but here's one thing I can think of that might be causing this. When JPEGs are saved, they break the image up into squares of (IIRC) 8px across, and each square has its colour defined by a small quantity of numbers which determine how the colour changes across that block. This saves a lot of space, 'cause you don't need the full 8x8x3 (192) bytes to colour that square, but it does mean that it can only approximate rapid colour changes 'cause it can't store enough information to do otherwise. This is why edges of text look fuzzy in JPEG, but I'm thinking it probably also means that the edge of the mask is a little fuzzy, and the edge of the character sprite is a little fuzzy.

Where the mask is fuzzy, it'll mean that what used to be your first totally-opaque pixel is now slightly transparent, letting the background through. There's not much you can do about that, of course, save for saving the JPEGs in question at a higher quality if they're not already at maximum. Where the character graphic is fuzzy, though, it may lead to corruption of your edge colours, and there might be something you can do about that. Good PNG-saving routines colour the transparent pixels 'next' to edges the same colour as the edge pixels, only with a 0 alpha; this is because the PNG routine compresses large chunks of the same colour most efficiently, so it's best for compression reasons to have the same colour even in the totally-transparent bits. Bad PNG-saving routines will save whatever colour the original document has regardless of the fact that it's fully transparent - and this is often white. I seem to recall that, for example, Photoshop's PNG-saving has come in for this criticism.

It depends how the tool saves out the JPEGs, and I couldn't find the thread in a quick scan so I can't say for sure, but if it saves them with the same data in the transparent BG as was there before (which would be easiest), and if you used something with a bad PNG-saving routing to save the originals, then the character sprite being fuzzy will mean that that BG colour, saved in the original PNG, will now bleed over into your edges a little - if it's white, that'll also lighten them a lot. The only thing you could do about that would be to fix the JPEG to have a black BG - either by saving the PNG that way in the first place or by altering it afterwards (I'm thinking open your original in PS, fill a BG layer in black and save the whole thing out as a JPEG over the top of the JCC-made one).




Of course, if it is the case that the JCC tool just uses whatever colour is in the image when it opens it for the JPEG's background, it might be nice for that to be altered to have an 'edge hinting colour' or something which it fills all alpha-0 pixels with before saving the JPEG... but I don't know how much work that would be, or whether it already does something like that.





[EDIT: Although, it does make me wonder whether non-negligible space might be saved with a 8bpp PNG for the sprite and a 4bpp PNG for the mask, which would avoid these problems... and most character sprites would be fine in 8bpp colour if it wasn't for alpha...]

It's also the case with JCC that the edges are a little less distinct, because it's hard for a jpeg to represent a 0 to 255 transition in a single pixel, without artifacts. You do wind up getting a little blurring of the edges, and even if the base image is perfect, you're going to have that difference.

At least in my experiments, I thought it something that took a little getting used to (since the image changed a little), but once I got used to it, I didn't think one version of the image or the other was better or worse. YMMV.

PyTom wrote:Two things:

- What are the stats for a game of that size?

- Did you switch out DejaVuSans for another font? That's a good way to lose another few hundred k compressed.

Right now its at 5k, but when I get all the script complete and executed it should hit 10k.
I'm in the process of testing the endings and persistent triggering while it still doesn't take too long to skip through the game.

I'm using another true type font. There's no DejaVuSans in my game directory.

Jake >> Yup, I think Photoshop's fault. I always wondered why blank pngs took up so much space. Incidentally, I had a couple of places were the lineart was wobbly and miraculously, they look more solid because of this 'defect'. It's just in certain places of skin tone changes that the graying out occurs. I've decided I'll live with it, since the end result still looks very decent.

DaFool wrote:I'm using another true type font. There's no DejaVuSans in my game directory.

The question is, is it still in common/?

PyTom wrote:

DaFool wrote:I'm using another true type font. There's no DejaVuSans in my game directory.

The question is, is it still in common/?

Aha!

I just moved the original 500kb DejaVuSans out of the way. I moved my 65kb truetype font from my game directory to /common, renamed it to DejaVuSans.ttf, and now even the Launcher uses it! Upon building distros, the "new default font" is found in the common.

I replaced a few key alpha'd jpgs with their original png originals, so that brought me up a few kilobytes.

Still... now I'm 4.96mb for the Windows distro! If I reduce any unnecessary code and keep comments to a minimum, I might be able to keep the game under 5mb.

Other techniques I used to keep sizes down is splitting the repeatable music portions, so I just queue them and repeat. Those which don't sound too bad are 64kbps ogg, while those that need the detail to not fall apart stay 96kbps.

Every single image piece in this game is *absolutely necessary* and reused, and no graphic is bigger than 66kb.