The game is almost in a shippable state already. We’re only missing some final GUI tweaks (mainly the choice menus), some CGs, and the final background in terms of required things.
I staged music and sound effects throughout the game this past week. Also did some more GUI tweaking and writing cleanup.
@poorlyformed has been hard at work on backgrounds, and we should have the last one shortly… then it’s on to CGs.
We’ve also now got a gallery that unlocks images as you complete the game.
On the writing side of things, I’m up to just under 11,000 words, and am calling the script done for now. There’s still some polish I’ll need to do, but I’ll wait until we finish staging the game for that.
I’ve also started working on the GUI. It’s very…. eggplant-ful. And I really like it.
On the art side of things, @poorlyformed has finished another two backgrounds as well as some other random pieces of art for the game.
In case it wasn’t obvious, I’m working on a game for barajam (Earth Boys Are Easy) with the amazingly talented @poorlyformed. It’s technically been more than a week, but we’ll call it that for the sake of simplicity.
In that time, I have written approximately 7800 words, and staged all of the current sprites and backgrounds.
PF has, naturally, finished up three sprites (Ajax, Cato, and the MC Luke), as well as one background (with a few variants). There’s also some other completed art (the logo and title screen image), but those aren’t in the game yet.
Here’s a screenshot which demonstrates pretty much everything that exists so far in the game.
It’s a little weird seeing the default RenPy GUI, because GUI replacement is usually one of the first things I do in a game. But that will have to wait until after writing is complete, in this case.
Excited to officially announce the dating sim I’m working on for #BaraJam! Earth Boys Are Easy is the story of Luke, a lonely eggplant farmer whose life is changed by some out-of-this-world visitors. @poorlyformed will be handling the art and I will be writing and programming
A couple of days late, but I wanted to note some YAGS news.
As you saw last post, Juan’s sprite is done. The first, related, news is that I’m renaming Juan to Carlos. The game will be updated for the “final” demo build, and I’m going to go through and retroactively change all of the companion fics I’ve been writing. There’s a lot of reasons for the change, but one bonus is less confusion around “J” names. (Can you believe the protag was originally named “John” too?)
Juan’sCarlos’ sprite is also supposed to be the start of a more steady stream of sprite work, as we now have general dates for all of the remaining sprites.
Which means… I can start setting some release dates! My goal is to push a “final” demo build in late November or early December, which will include final versions of everything except sprites. And even then it should only be a few sprites missing. At that point, I’ll sic some official beta testers on the game to suss out any remaining bugs…
…Because I’m establishing an official game release date of February 2019. That date may still slip, but I’m hoping it won’t fall too far.
Here’s an image of all of the characters so far. (All finished sprites via @stollcomics, as always.)
The game will be free (via itch.io and possibly Steam?) when it releases, but I’ll offer some bonuses for donations (soundtrack, wallpapers, and a behind-the-scenes book with game tips and tricks), if you want to support my gamedev efforts.
(As always, the demo is playable now, and includes basically the full game minus sprite and music polish.)
The other big piece of news is that @soulsoftea is onboard to provide some CGs, at least to cover the endings of each path, so expect some more awesome art to cap out the game experience. A (very preliminary) sketch of the first one is below (cut both for NSFW and mild spoilers of who the game routes are):
It’s the one-year anniversary of the first public YAGS release. We’ve come quite a long way in that time.
Still a lot of progress to go, primarily around sprites, but it’s really interesting to see how this game has matured over the past year thanks to amazing feedback from so many awesome people.
Good progress this week! The entire first half of the game (the first three days of in-game time) has been edited with a first pass. Looks like we’re landing on 19,137 words as the approximate size of the first half of the game.
Also all of the sprites and backgrounds are staged in!
The backgrounds will need some editing and/or replacing, the script could use another editing pass, and we still need to stage in all the music, but we’re approaching completion of the first half of the game!
I’ve also made some tweaks to the UI. The save/load screen and the preferences screens both look better now.
We slightly missed our goal of half the game being done by the end of June, but not by much!
Over the next week, I hope to finish up script edits, find and stage music, and finish the UI work, and then we’ll have at least half a game that is shippable.
