August Update

Hey all! It's now been a year since I first started work on this game--it's a long journey, but progress is made every made.

A TL;DR:

• Updated phone bugs (seem) all fixed
• Engine is more sturdy
• Started working to make sure long-running save files won't run poorly
• Almost all art assets are now final!
• We've got all our major sequences finished writing!!!

The last point is certainly the most exciting, and easiest to talk about.  

Writing

Princess 2 has been a bit of a behemoth to write since the gameplay & aesthetic is meant to be very different than Princess 1. Princess 1's main sequences include, which you've probably seen/experienced some of:

• Wedding Planning
• Game show organizing
• Ex-dating subterfuge
• Surviving assassination 

It's hijinks, and it's not often high-fantasy. P2, on the other hand, has the following sequences:

• Weapons training
• Weapon searching in the Thousand-Fold Caves
• Finding head of an old evil emperor (feat. almost being assassinated again)
• Commanding troops on the battlefield (feat. P1 teaching you proper texting etiquette)
• Lastly, defeating your mother in one-on-one combat to prove the Power Of Love

Both characters also have mini-scenes, some random events, and more opportunities for texting (spent so much time making the damn thing work, it better get used!).

For the nitty-gritty, under-the-hood work, continue on (also, note the attached P2 prologue demo!!).

Phone system

I'm really excited to have the phone system working well! It was a bit buggy WRT remember what choices you've made, and I wanted there to not be an insane amount of work actually being done by the engine (some of the early, dump implementations had it so that if you had a long chat history, it would've been rendering all the choices & then removing them after the fact, even though it wasn't visible). 

With the functioning animations & the like, things are feeling good!

Engine fixes & long-term stability

As I've said before, when all is said and done, I'd like to put the engine this game was built on out into the world to allow people to make games in a similar style. I made it because, honestly, I struggle reading lots of heavy-text games, and find even when there are things like textboxes for dialogue, it just disrupts the flow by making a wall of text seem even bigger. 

Other solutions included in-line text, no fancy boxes, but colour-coding dialogue. That can look solid, and is absolutely one of lowest-effort, highest-reward solutions, but without a good eye for colour (which I don't think I have), it's hard to have a page look nice with high enough contrast to keep it accessible & readable.

My attempted-solution is halfway between past approaches--using a click-advance dialogue approach, but allowing you to see previous dialogue to help inform decisions, or just enjoy the flow.

I've managed to chip away at my original system until it's now it's somewhat user friendly, but still lends itself most toward twine-devs writing in twee (which can be a steep point of entry, if you're using twine so you don't have to know much about programming in the first place!!). 

Down the line, I'm thinking of getting some other devs help me convert this system into a macro-friendly implementation. A piece of dialogue currently looks like:

<div class="tb character">Some text</div>

"tb" needs to be on every piece of dialogue, and then "character" is the key to whoever is speaking so that the dialogue can 1) Have the proper name above it 2) Have the proper sprite beside it 3) Be floated to the correct side of the screen. I've made strides by making an <<addcharacter>> widget that defines all the required properties for a character (so no custom CSS needed to even define sprites!), but I think it would be good to have a <<tb>> macro that could function like the following:

<<tb "character">>Some text<</tb>>

That <<tb>> would output the exact same div as above, but now you don't have to think about HTML tags! I would probably also make it so <<tb>> with no specified character would result in narration (which currently needs <p>to be wrapped in paragraph tags</p>).

Anyway, at this point I'm just spitballing ideas & not really talking about progress, so! Let's move on.

More Assets

The wonder olbeyblade_jpeg has made one of the last batches of sprites, which include new characters, and best of all, some more expressive characters!

Along with that, there are also overlays to help further with emoting! The emoting is not implemented yet (it'll happen during the first editing pass, so that I'm not emoting  stuff that I cut a week later), but they include such classics as the Sweatdrop & the Forehead Vein

Final thoughts & Prologue2 

For a nice treat, since the penultimate demo still has some work to go (penultimate will be both princesses, but probably buggy; final demo will be the final, bug-tested and fully edited game at time of release), I've attached the playable prologue for P2! You finally get to see P2's side of that fateful meeting! It also features some of the updated visuals :D