Okay so far, in JAMV2K3, I have to redo the code for the Level Up screen mainly because the code for it isn't really readable enough so that in case if I do come back to the code, which should've been fixed with comments but I digress. If there's one thing that makes it hard to do, it's probably making it work and also the fact that I have to draw the assets first.

Now the HUD is fine and dandy, in fact in this redo, I'm removing the shadow because it's really not that necessary for the game at all. The next thing I'm worried about is making it so that it doesn't need to load the scene EVERY TIME it is needed so it's very seamless. If Jonathan and Kabi leveled up, it should play with the two together, albeit Jonathan is first, then Kabi, and so on. But the third problem is something that isn't really programmer related, rather it's a problem on my art skills. So what's the problem?

Posing with non-human characters, or more specifically, characters that don't have anything similar to a human skeleton, like Sasara. Characters like Sasara are often the hardest to draw because of how limited it is to pose a character like her. While she's relatively simple to draw compared to other characters anatomically wise, she's not that easy to draw when it comes to poses. It's practically a cube with hands and that's not really a lot to work with.

You might think "why not reuse the old art for the game?" I say no because that's really lazy and just makes no sense if the cast are going to have an updated appearance to reflect MORE of their original appearances, albeit with some adjustments. One example is Kabi because she's the character with the most changes as I wanna make it clear that everyone, unless stated to be a minor, SHOULD LOOK like an adult, because I don't like the idea they're teens. They aren't and I hate the trope of teens saving the world, plus it's not really a troop that's used well in the story so might as well make them adults in the first place. Why Kabi? Well, it's because of the fact that I'm changing the body shape to resemble a more general hourglass body and also making the shoulder distance BE more wider. Kabi's head just makes the distance small. ...Though in the old art, I don't know why Imasu has a bit of a pear figure. I swear it's not intentional but... yeah... weird.

Barely their ages matter in the original story anyway but might as well try than not to try. But the only one who's going to be changed the less is Jonathan because I feel anatomically wise he doesn't need much changes. He has a big ass head but I'm not shrinking it at all, so longer body it is and smaller hands and feet that make sense for an average adult to have. There's not much to change him about so yeah, he gets the least amount of them.

Now back to posing, I feel like the posing in the old art just have a bad grasp on the characters' personalities. This is mainly with Sasara and Imasu because for their Level Up poses, it's out of character, and for faces, Imasu just looks too similar to Kabi's faces in terms of posing mainly by the head. I don't think he would be that close to the camera in the first face, so might as well go for a redraw. And yes, all of the characters are getting a redraw mainly because I'm doing a different approach for faces in this game. Instead of facesets which is capped at 16 faces per file, spritesheets are instead used for cutscenes and dialogue. The main reason why I would do this is for something like if there's multiple characters in the scene saying the same dialogue, I can just add them in without having to change the text space around, because with a faceset, the dialogue window has less room for text, which means a mandatory rewrite for ALL dialogue to be at almost the same length as the original game, but still fit in 3 lines per dialogue boxes, meaning actual original dialogue I MUST write for the game.

Though it's pretty late for the devlog so I'll cap it here and see you on the last Sunday of Pride Month. See you next time.