Hey again!

I'm still stuck in the Eastern Tower segment of the game, but there is an end in sight! I finished all the puzzles within, added all the story events and the side events you can find, and am now working on balancing the very first boss. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't played the original, but let's just say you get payback for what happened at the end of the demo!

One thing I have begun to realize is just how much events actually take out of me! There's just more in putting it all together than I realized and this is without my lack of ability to use lefts and rights correctly. So in this devlog, I decided I should show you what all I have to do to get it to work!

This is a typical set up for just your basic message back and forth! I have a variable to control which lip flaps will be shown (and somehow I remember what number is which lipflap), and then I have to have the portrait pieces loaded (the base and then the emotion because I'm trying to cut down on size bloat so those are separate), and then I have a common event to fade them in, a common event to call the lipflaps so they work as soon as the text begins, and then another common event for their specified blinking!

As you can see, Snowe has special ones. As in the original, the farther you make it in the game, the darker his dark circles grow from lack of meaningful sleep. Those have to be called separately and then, as a result, he needs his own set of portrait fade-in/fade-out common events.

Well, this looks awful on a dark background and gif-ified, but you get the gist of the pieces that have to make Snowe and the other portraits up! Fun fact, his portrait has 29 different pieces so far! Wow! 

There's a lot going into the portraits and I just hope it all works and RPG Maker MV doesn't mess it up. There's definitely a lot for me to keep track of, but so far I think I've been doing an all right job of it! Hiante's portrait is so easy. He doesn't have any emotions since he is, in fact, a skeleton. All I have to do is call his portrait and that's that, hah!

As for what else I've got done this week, I made a running sprite for Snowe! So when you hold the dash button, he'll actually look like he's running around instead of simply power walking. I think it helps and even if it's not perfect, I'm pretty proud of it especially since I'm not really the best spriter.

Anyway, I am doing my best! Progress is slow and steady. Until next devlog! Hopefully by then I'll be at the next dungeon and I can show some stuff in progress!