Hello! So I'm returning to regular updates, but for now it'll be once a month, on the 1st, instead of every monday.

Since last update, I spent January mostly iterating on the town, textures, models... Still missing work, but it's heading on a good direction!

I might admittedly procrastinate a bit too much on Street View, but I really enjoy the process. This general area is basically the inspiration for every area in the game, every point is a location I regularly come back to for inspiration. My reason to focus on Shikoku is pretty stupid, but when I played Shogun 2 (Total War series, a strategy war game) I used to play a lot of campaigns as the Chosokabe clan, which started on that island.

February was for changes in portraits mostly. After wanting to double down on the PC-98 art inspiration, there's some changes on the character art.

I know, I know, "stop fucking redoing everything every couple of months". I understand, I feel that way too, but I just can't for the life of me share with you something that I know it's not good enough for me. NOW I'm at a point where I think it's good enough, that I want to keep going in this direction. Biggest change has been to draw a sketch before in normal line art, which seems so incredible obvious that I feel stupid. Before I used to go on shapes (which were really bad to begin with). I guess I wasn't confident in line art, but after practicing a lot that has changed. The 3 original! It's a WIP, but I wanted to share these three with you.

Here's some iterations of Ume, Keiko's sister, and a new government official.

I also spent some time learning the basics of shaders, since that's one of my biggest weaknesses. I'll record some footage for next time, but I got working some wind that looks more natural on vegetation. Before a gush of wind affected every vertex of the model of grass the same way, so it was very uniform and weird looking; now it affects each vertex of the model individually, based on the world position, so it's more natural. Also with shaders, got working that the vegetation reacts to a vector and so it tries to "push away" from it, so it simulates movement when the player is moving through grass. That alone was ok, but also made some manual animation (just simple rotation) of the general grass object so it rustles a bit.

All of this is inconsequential, but sometimes there's a bunch of small things I want to fix, leave them for a long time without touching, and then come back and spent a day or two on it. The models are not fishined, since I want to try to have 2D sprites instead of simple untextured planes, but want to watch out the performance on extreme cases of thousands of 2D sprites, I'm still not sure on the 3D plane with multiple vertex vs simpler 2D sprite with transparency.

I did a couple more things, but that's it for today. This month of March I'll focus mainly on gameplay, since the gameplay loop has changed. Even if the last public version of Love Inn was basically a visual novel, I never intended it to be that way. I got lost a little bit on trying to make playable builds as quickly as possible, and I didn't put enough time into the gameplay itself. After developing this for a while without any public builds, it's closer to what I wanted it to be. Expect more gameplay, interactions with the environment, less dialogue.

I post more WIPs in my Discord or Twitter if you want to see more. More on April, thanks for reading!