Heya, all y’all!

I’m thinking the 10th of each month is the right day for an update, so I’ll stick to it as best as I can. (I’m cutting it real close, sheesh.)

First, the announcement that’s clear by the title: There’ll be an update to Latex Island this very week! What does that mean? Well, for everyone who’s been hoping to stop getting teased and finally have some real transformation content, I have great news for you.

There’s a whole new region to explore, although it’s currently sparse for content. There’s also a draft of the introductory events of the first region, as well as the first mission of the region’s main quest, including 3 (4?) new scenes with partial art (and more art to come in the future).

It’s not as much as I’d like to show off, and I may wind up changing things in the future, but I’m going to post it because it’s about time I do.

Also, expect a walkthrough! I know some people want that.

Game Plans

Next month, I won’t be releasing new content. I was originally intending on getting the next two main quests and a few side quests done, but working on what I have has shown me the limitations of my current sensory system, which involves a number of inefficiencies and bad coding practices I put in there just to make it all work.

As a neat little behind-the-scenes, how my system currently works means having an autorun event inside each map (‘event 1’) that creates arrays containing all of the sound, scent, and observe tagging information for each applicable event, with another separate event to handle the observe results.

For the sound and scent elements, though, I ran into a problem, because they rely on the event ID, followed by manually assigning array entries to each. This means if an event like an NPC is supposed to ‘leave the scene’, it will still produce sounds and scent particles, and can still be observed.

If instead, I have a fully separate dictionary in a plugin file that assigns all of these things to image names, then I can streamline the process and cut down on time and errors. Because the game uses tall characters, every sprite has a different filename, which is why this change will be able to work. Furthermore, events with no image can be tagged as no longer producing those sensory elements. Then, ‘event 1’ can handle exceptions, or I can add exceptions via comment or notetag to each applicable event individually.

Fortunately it’s early enough in the design process that I can change all of this without having to change too many things across the whole game, which is why I’m taking this month for handling all that.

Aside of that, and smaller, I’m considering adding a bust system for dialogue. I’m not entirely enthusiastic about the way I’m doing it now, and I’m not sure if I want to just use the small portraits, but I want to try it out and see how it feels as opposed to just names with dialogue.

With luck, I’ll be able to share success and real content plans on the 10th of December.

The Rest

Thank you everyone for following! I hope you enjoy the new update this week.