Hiya friends!

With the Patreon rerelease drawing ever nearer I’ve been working on the CG part of the game. Every good H-game has some killer art to collect (usually referred to as CGs), and Altarune is no different. As I just got done designing the first CG unlocking minigame I thought now would be a good time to kick off a little sub-series I’ll be doing about the game’s design. I will discuss some of the more interesting challenges faced when designing Altarune systems, and how I solve them.

Continue reading “Design Discussion: On Collecting and Displaying CG Artwork”

In the original vertical slice Play Mode was completely absent. There was no way to directly interact with the girl and, while it made sense given the constraints at the time, I really should have implemented this before sending it out into the world. They say hindsight is 20/20. Lucky for us, 2020 is upon us now, and here’s what I plan to do during its first few months.

Continue reading “Play Mode Update”

Alright, let’s talk about where this thing’s at and where’s it’s going!

Past: When I first started Altarune’s Patreon I had just created a vertical slice. This meant providing a playable demo build featuring the absolute bare-bones gameplay features to give a sense of the game’s flow. You could walk through a randomly generated 2-floor dungeon with a standard Unitychan model, hit away at slimes that featured some very rudimentary AI, see and interact with dialog, place furniture in your house and enter a non-functional “play mode”.

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Holy hairballs on a stick, it’s happening! Now that I’m spending a substantial amount of time and work on project Altarune again I finally bit the bullet and set up a proper(ish) development blog. Is it quick and dirty? Sure. Will it win any beauty prices? Hell no! Will it allow me to quickly keep everyone up to date and provide some more behind-the-scenes info? You bet your sweet little ass it does!

Continue reading “An Actual Devlog”

Now that Nekome’s 3D model is completely finished I spent some time playing around with different looks and shaders. While I first went for a more traditional “3D” look I finally settled on a more anime-inspired set of shaders instead. I have since modified these some and think it’s in a pretty good place right now. In the future I might add support for shadow maps, but for right now I think this will suffice. Normal editing can help a lot in major problem areas as and where they show up.