By Your Side [NaNo2019] [Romantic Cohabitation SLG] (COMPLETE)

[TakafumiSakagami]

Hooh boy. There's a lot to talk about this time!

As part of my efforts in making the game playable on mobile devices, I decided to implement yet another menu. My quickmenu is already implemented, but it is isolated to the interaction screen. So for general use I need a new menu: A textbox menu.



This menu sits on top of the textbox and features three buttons: quicksave, quickload and skip. Very simply functions that previously couldn't be accessed by mobile users. Easy fix.

While on the topic of UI, I sat down and made a settings screen.I hate how long these screens to make, so I settled on a basic concept that I wouldn't have to invest too much time in.



All the buttons have idle, hovered and selected states. The bars are segmented into tenths to give an accurate percentage measurement for users; personally I hate not being able to see what 10% looks like in a bar.

You may also notice that the navigation menu is different now. I finished it! It sits there at the bottom of the settings screen, though since that screenshot was taken directly from the main menu it is missing some other buttons.



This is what the navigation menu looks like in-game. I conveniently shoved the Save and Main Menu options onto one side so that I didn't have to program multiple versions of the menu with if-flag placements. I've done the whole evolving-menus idea in the past with my other VN Aious and frankly it isn't worth the time investment... At least not for a game like By Your Side.

In other news, we have seven new songs! That's more a technicality than a truth, but it's something.



My favourite soundtrack of 2018 was the soundtrack of SSSS.Gridman, and it was made primarily of a single song: Human Love. They would rework and modify the song to make it fit various emotions and scenarios, and I really liked that.
So for By Your Side I made a track named Eternum. I then made a load of versions of it. Some have added drums or guitars. Some are much faster, and some are much slower. Some are sombre and some are inspiring. They're all mood fillers, made to work with every possible scenario..

Here's a couple samples:

Eternum (Alone)

Eternum (Broken)

[TakafumiSakagami]

I'm gonna be honest. My sleep pattern got completely messed up yesterday because I stayed awake throughout that entire 24 hour chunk, and to pay for it I spent most of today asleep... But I've tried to rush things out to fit into today's update, so here we go.

As far as minor changes go, I implemented all of the music into the game, reworked the energy system, and made some slight tweaks to the shop. Nothing I can really show off though. Oh and there was this annoying problem with how I'd placed the textboxmenu hide commands. They were all slightly too far down, so they'd stick around for a second after the textbox had gone away. That was tedious to fix.

For things I can show, a new CG is in the middle of being made.



It's for the heroine, and the plan is to have two different head positions with one body, and then a third head position that comes with a unique pose. So in a way it's 2½ CGs.

That's all though. Short day, but I'll try and make up for it tomorrow!

[TakafumiSakagami]

Geeeeh, I'm so tiiiired. It's incurable! I go to bed for 6 hours and it feels like I haven't slept at all.

Okay, it's day 20. We've got 11 days to go and I'm in that position where all that's left to make is more content. More drawing to be done, more writing to be had. This is where it gets easy, but it's also where it gets tedious.



Part of the tedium is in drawing so much, and oh boy do I regret making the heroine's hair so detailed. This little CG is used in a flashback sequence, and it has two forms. The one shown above, and the one shown below.



I was originally going to have a second pose, but the image was taking long enough to make, and it only shows up for a handful of seconds, so it's not really worth the time investment.

I also finished this other CG finally.



That's all for the 20th! Future plans include a minimum of 2 CGs and a lot of writing, so I'll probably have less to talk about as we go along. 10 more days to go and we'll be done!

[TakafumiSakagami]

To start with the smallest change, I edited the mobile version of the texboxmenu. I realised that the buttons were sometimes covering text due to Ren'Py's default mobile textbox changes, so that's fixed now!

I then decided to finally make imagebuttons for all our random temporary text buttons. Like those awkward text+image buttons used in the interaction scene.



This fixes the bug I had where spam clicking a button would repeatedly transition you into the scene the button is set to jump to.



In the wardrobe and map screen we now have a 'done' button. Oh and I added shadows around the outside of the map screen in order to make the stats overlay pop.



I also made a lot of new shop icons to fit all of the newly programmed purchasable items. That took a lot of time to do. Making each image and programming each unlock sequence was veeeerry tedious. I had to make a quick text document to keep track of what each flag was and where it was triggered...



I took the time to revise the script however. A bunch of new unlocks have been added, and some older unlocks have been overhauled. The progression curve has also been altered, with starting values, income and attribute gains, and the chance of rng unlocks all being reworked to feel nicer.

Another small change was the addition of skip stops. I found it was quite awkward to stop the game from skipping if you had both "skip unread text" and "skip after choices" on,  Adding stops before any important moments of interaction retains the actual ability to play the game without slowing down the skip process too much.



During all this I also added in the CGs from yesterday. Testing them to make sure they work is pretty annoying because the playtime is really increasing. The image above shows up in the prologue, so that's fine, but the below image took around half an hour of skipping to get to!



I also wrote another 676 words. The game contains 913 dialogue blocks, containing 6,838 words and 35,999 characters, for an average of 7.5 words and 39 characters per block.

And in the background I did more work on the Opening animation. Can't show off any of that stuff yet, but it's being worked on.

[TakafumiSakagami]

The recent focus on UI continues!

Following the pursuit of mobile compatibility I upscaled a bunch of buttons. Had to do a bit of work to them so that they didn't look blurry and full of artefacts, but it didn't take long.



I took some time to make a little chibi doll of the heroine. By making a transformable cheeb I could use her to decorate the screen that appears at the start of each day.



I could theoretically add as many poses as there are days in the game, but I settled on 5.






I'm kiiinda tempted to outright turn this into a Shimejii and package it with the game. I've made custom Shimejii characters in the past, so I have the experience, but it'll ultimately depend on if I have the time to do so before the month is over.

Anyway, to end it with actual game stuff... We've got yet another CG!

[TakafumiSakagami]

It's day 23, and we're so close to the end I can feel it! Only a handful of assets are left to create, and the game is looking pretty fleshed out. See for yourself!



As you can see in the video, we now have night time variations of the background images. We've also implemented all of yesterday's assets.



Today we have even more new assets. Here's a CG of the heroine!



This CG comes with 6 different expressions. It's used during a dialogue heavy scene, so some extra work was required on that front. Take make up for that time investment, the rest of the CG is relatively simple.

I made some simply loading screen and icon images for the android version.
Also uuuuuh, voice acting hype. We've got voices! You'll have to wait for release to hear them though~

[TakafumiSakagami]

I had a bit of a busy day, so I didn't get time to screenshot anything. Gonna be a lack of images this time. When update posts start looking like this, you know we're almost finished.

We've got more writing! Now the game contains 945 dialogue blocks, containing 7,053 words and 37,147 characters.

We've got a new background image! Bit of a weird one, but it has a place.



The history screen has been improved. Mainly changes to the padding and text alignment.

The heroine's expression and pose changes have been programmed for all of the currently written scenes.

More work was done on the Opening animation. All of the frames have been sketched, and they'll get lined and coloured soon.

Aaaand the ending has been programmed.There's now a way to actually beat the game!

[TakafumiSakagami]

It's another relatively boring day to talk about, but I had a lot of fun with day 25. Most of it involved programming~

Lots of arguably meaningless changes were made, including altered sprite display effects,  new heroine sprite positioning during dialogue, and some pose changes. I also modified some of the clothing slightly, 'cause I noticed there was a 1pixel gap in some outfits around the edges.
It doesn't seem like much when talked about in a post like this, but every currently written scene is now completely programmed.

I need some kind of excuse to post an image or two, so here's some sneak peaks at the opening animation's progress!







Another thing I can't really show off yet... The voices are all programmed in! It's kinda crazy how big a difference it makes in quality. I've always been the type to struggle with VNs that have no voices, so this is definitely a personal opinion, but the addition of voices makes By Your Side so much more lively and enjoyable. There are several variations of some lines, and similar to how the interaction scenes are chosen randomly, the voiced lines to accompany them are also picked randomly from the several different versions. This adds a bit of extra life to the heroine.
The performance of the voice actor is great too, so naturally that is the main reason for why this addition is so great. I can't wait for you to see some of the amazing laughs, and the day-end dialogue is particularly adorable.

[TakafumiSakagami]

Today I did my best to do things that would look interesting in a blog post, so there's lots of images to share. To begin with however, I'll talk about the uninteresting stuff...

I wrote and programmed another 800 words. This encompasses the closing scene of the game. Buuuut I did some editing, and went over the rest of the game, and removed ~20 or so words, so my current word count is now 7,837 or 41,296 characters.

On a new topic, I added a bunch of sound effects. There is a camera snap for specific scenes, and each of the game's locations has ambience. With this added to the game I could finally balance all of the game's audio channels and determine our default settings. The 10% increments I added to the setting menu's bars really helped find exact values.

I decided I didn't like the credits I had added previously, so I went and redid them in a completely different way. Instead of being an ugly thing powered by completely over the top code, I've got a simple image that scrolls.



And on the topic of redoing things, the CG Gallery and Music Player have been fully designed and programmed! They aren't important features, so before this they were just vboxes and hboxes. Now that I'm full of free time, I may as well make them look a bit prettier.





There's also a menu with some thank yous and a bug notice, but it's just plain text on a background, so nothing worth sharing there.

Also the previous balcony background wasn't doing it for me, so I made a completely new one. I was pretty lazy with the original, trying to save as much time as I could, but it really didn't pay off. Much better to put time into something.



That's Day 26 done! Tomorrow I plan to draw one final CG, possibly write some more, and possibly add more to the Opening animation. Aside from that... We're all done!

[TakafumiSakagami]

Here's something interesting to do with writing. I added another 290 words for some major scenes, and in doing so I realised... There's only one more scene to write! I'll probably spend the additional days adding extra bits of text here and there, but there's only one mandatory scene left to create.

I altered a bunch of old programming too, but nothing interesting. Just quality of life fixes and dumb stuff like making sure fades and image changes are timed right and placed at the best moments.

Up until today there was also only one CG left to create, but lo and behold the final CG is here! If this isn't the perfect CG to end our month of drawing on, I don't know what is...





I decided to scrap the "Watch TV" interaction. It was originally included as a way to skip the daytime, much like the sleep interaction that appears at night. However the gardening interaction very quickly turns into an easy skip method once you've completed the related quest. Having that ability—to quickly skip through days to unlock further scenes—locked behind an interactive quest makes it feel more rewarding. An acknowledgement of the player's ability to explore that gets rewarded with a tool to speed up exploration.

To make up for this I changed the progression of unlockable content. The 100 days I initially decided upon wasn't working, so I pulled it back to 50. Now there's a consistent abundance of new unlocks, be it clothing, furniture, new scenes, or fancy CG reveals. New items are added to the shop throughout the 50 days. Affection-based scenes are expected to unlock during periods where nothing else is happening. New daily interactions unlock as you go through the days. It's a lot smoother overall.

Oh and I made some ambience sfx for the park area since I forgot to do that yesterday.

[TakafumiSakagami]

We're spending all day in Premiere Pro, After Effects and Clipstudio Paint today. Time to finish that opening animation!

That is unfortunately all this post will be about though. All animation. Why? The render times for it were ridiculous. To give you an idea, the first attempt took over 2 hours to render 4%. Even after scaling it back a bit, it took hours. Hours of time in which the computer couldn't do anything else...

That being said the first half of my day was spent creating all of the required assets, so it wasn't an unproductive day. I think I made... 26 new images? If I'm that remembering correctly. I really wanted to get this done by today, so I rushed through with no breaks to get it done.

Anyway! Here it is~

[TakafumiSakagami]

Tada~ We are done! I spent today going through the game, fixing any typos and bugs I spotted. After that I took up the task of uploading versions to the storefront for distribution. But it's all done now, and I can finally take a break!

[TakafumiSakagami]

Here's a mini little update!

One of the last minute CGs I added was missing from the CG gallery, and clicking on the button for it would crash the game. That's fixed now.
Some scenes were missing pose changes. I fixed that.
Some scenes were slightly too infrequent, so I rebalanced the chance values.
Oh, and I added an icon for computer-based launchers.

[Zelan]

I disappeared from the internet halfway through NaNo and I wasn't able to follow the progress of this game, but I'm back now! ^_^ It looks amazing and I'm hoping to buy it and play through it with my girlfriend soon. I'll let you know what we think when we finish it!

[TakafumiSakagami]

Thank you! I hope you've had fun catching up with everything. There were some really interesting entries.