Dev's Notes: Hex Education 5

Dev's Notes: Hex Education Part Five

It's been a while since the last Dev's Notes on the in-progress patch. Like, a month. It's been a pretty hectic time. But there's no point to just laying around forever feeling sorry for myself now, is there? So here's two topics:

Firstly, I'm hoping that the new demo build will be entering playtesting sometime in March. That doesn't mean the demo will be out by then, not necessarily, playtesting might take a while. But I want to set this as a goal. Hopefully it'll work out better than last time.

Secondly, I guess this Dev's Notes will be about some of the new art assets that'll be joining the game come the new update. Most importantly, Hex Education will be bringing with it a complete face overhaul. Up until now I've been using MV's innate sprite-maker to just sort of muddle my way along but that's over now.
With the help of Eadgear (whose personal thread can be found here), all of the facesets currently within the game have been getting reworked and replaced. This is the first step of moving Unborn Daughter away from default assets entirely and I'm very happy to finally be starting this process. Here are a few of the results:

As well as giving updated art for the faces of not only the PC's but also (eventually, it'll take a while to roll this out fully) every NPC, this also allows me to go back and fix a problem that's been noted by several people. The old placeholder facepics didn't have much variation in visible emotion, aside from a few extreme circumstances. But now all of the party members will be able to visibly express themselves much more dynamically!

Okay, maybe using Dorothy was a bad example. She's pretty stoic. Look at Ria instead.

Another upside of this is that Ria finally gets to be depicted as much more realistically goopy looking and mutated than her face-painted placeholder ever did. This brings her much more in line with her in-game illustrations.

And speaking of illustrations, those haven't stopped either! Here are a few pieces courtesy of Gehn, who's done most of the illustrative work for Unborn Daughter thus far.

This stark and sketchy piece is not actually part of the new content. It's going into Dorothy's dream sequence in the Snake Pit, which has languished without an actual background for far too long.

And this little lady (whose picture is too big to host on an itch.io blog post) is a character who has actually already appeared in the demo, albeit only briefly. But she'll be playing a much bigger role in the new content and with that comes a significant visual redesign, paired with this fantastic cutscene illustration.

This is just a little taste of the new art assets coming in the next update, many of which are still in development. Thank you for your time.