Today I wanted to showcase some of the work I've been doing over the past month for my game.

While this update may have taken a lot of time to make, I have to admit that this post will be relatively short.

Over the past month I have essentially overhauled how the game manages player progress, as well as how it loads new scenes.

Honestly I may have gone a bit autistic on developing this part, but I really wanted to create a mechanism that would track and manage what scenes get loaded as the player progresses through the game.

The challenge was not in how to get it all done, but in how to keep it organized based on areas of concern.

Also the project crossed a huge milestone as I finished up the logic for the save / load menu's options. Now I can test various game states and character load-outs without necessarily needing to run the game in the GB Studio environment.

I will not bog you down with the details though, so let's instead talk about the fancy stage intro cinematic I made!

So this is the cinematic players will see when they start a new game.

I was tempted to just have a text crawl because I'm a lazy guy, but I also wanted to leave a lasting first impression, so I went ahead and made this thing.

In terms of inspiration, I was trying to channel aspects of the intro for the Front Mission: GunHazard game, as well as the second Patlabor movie where the credits would display between scenes.

I wanted to add the credits too, but seeing as I am the only person working on the game it would have look very silly. In the end I opted for some flavour text to still maintain that dynamic feel of Patlabor 2's intro.

Believe it or not, there was another inspiration from an unlikely source:

The King Of Fighters

I recall one of the post 2000 era games showing the character K walking in a "I'm too cool for school," sorta way, and I thought it was so striking that I wanted to take a stab at a walk cycle of my own! Granted it's a 4 frame silhouette but I think it does the trick.

Also, once the cinematic is done you finally get to see a chapter title card in action.  In the previous post I made I showed a picture of it, however now you can finally get a sense of how it will be used.

Well that's it for now.

I'm sure I can talk more, but it's really late so I'm heading off to bed.

Hope you like and till next post!

-Nigel