Lamia chibi reveal + Devlog #098 + Dev poll results (Patreon)

Lamia!
As you can see, she's also getting an updated design. To be honest, she's one of a few I was pretty unhappy with. I liked her at first, but I can't look at her anymore, hence the new design. I mostly kept the old ideas I had but reorganized them: she now has two hair snakes, her haircut changed a bit, her clothes have changed a bit, especially her tanktop, and her tail looks a bit better. Her fight pose has also changed a bit, it made sense to raise her butt since her tail made it easy. It's almost catlike but it works better that way I think, and it feels more dynamic too. And I made her stick her tongue out to insist on her snake features too! And also because it's cute. So yeah, a bunch of little changes for a big improvement ^^

The next chibi will be the last of the high priority playable character ones!

Good news: I finished decorating the rooms! There isn't a whole lot I can share, but each area was basically its own challenge. I often had to go back to the code, or sometimes even touch up some of the objects' sprites, when I noticed bugs or imperfections, but it's all done!
One area in particular has a LOT of objects in each room, to the point where it actually slowed down the game. I looked into optimizing things, and after reorganizing the texture pages and improving my use of shaders, the game got a very nice performance boost! I was very happy with that since now not only that one area, but all of the overworld profits from it!

So, I'm going to copy paste the results of this month's dev polls, like last time:

Dev polls are for the Patreon release only! The public release later will be fully finished no matter the result.

Chibi BE

It's time! Chibi BE dev poll!
In general, every character will get 3 sets of chibis: rank 1, 3 and 5.
I might make a patreon goal to also have chibi sets for rank 2, 4 and 6 eventually,  but we'll see about that later.
So! As far as the Patreon release is concerned, I won't do chibi BE for the majority of the monstergirls. The only ones who I'm considering giving chibi BE to are Vuu and 2 other main party characters. The more relevant to the main story a character is, the more chibi sprites they have (because of cutscenes), and so the more work it is to do chibi BE. However for the Patreon release, there is also the option of only doing chibi BE for the exploration sprites (in which case cutscenes would only use rank 1 chibis).
Because I've never done chibi BE before, it's a bit hard for me to estimate how long it would take, especially since it can vary pretty wildly depending on the character. I'm anticipating it to be a bit of a pain but I don't truly know that yet, so you'll have to follow your heart on that one. What I can say is that choosing exploration only over exploration & cutscene will at least halve the time required to get it done. Below is a rough example of a rank 5 Imp chibi to give you a general idea of what that will look like. Size will vary depending on the character, of course!

Here are the options:

1 - None : No chibi BE. The fastest by far!

2 - chibi BE for Vuu (exploration only)

3 - chibi BE for Vuu (exploration & cutscenes)

4 - chibi BE for main party characters (exploration only)

5 - chibi BE for main party characters (exploration & cutscenes) 

Finally, Vuu is the only character to get a rank 2 chibi set because of cutscene reasons. No exploration only for that one, I either draw all of it for the Patreon release, or later for the public release:

1 - Now!

2 - Later! 

5 (= chibi BE for main party characters (exploration & cutscenes)) Wins!

I actually wasn't expecting this one to win, especially so decisively. As for the Vuu rank 2 poll:

2 (=Later) wins!

Quests

In the current demo, there is this one Voleian guard who asks Vuu to find fire gems. Interactions such as this one will be categorized as Quests in the next demo and will appear in their own tab of the almanach. Quests are optional and will generally involve other characters, and the bigger ones might even have a unique cutscene or two if I deem it necessary. They will also often lead to greater rewards, like unlocking a character, a character palette/costume, a power orb, etc...
I have a few bigger quests planned, but I'll leave these out of the patreon demo. However, I wouldn't be against adding a few other simple ones right away if there is an interest for it!
I'll play it safe here and say that each quest will take either 1 or 2 days to fully implement. I'd be fine with adding up to 4 quests.

How many would you like to see?

1 - None

2 - 1 quest

3 - 2 quests

4 - 3 quests

5 - 4 quests

3 (= 2 quests) Wins!

NPC variety

In the current demo, there are 10 types of chibi NPCs: the guards, and 9 different combination of 3 heads and 3 bodies, with different colors for each. These also share a few different simple poses.
Chibi NPCs won't be limited to Voleians in the next demo, and there are 3 races in particular I'd like to add. It's not absolutely necessary for all of these new chibi NPCs to be ready in the patreon demo though, since technically a single type of NPC would do the trick for non important characters.
I have relatively clear memories of when I drew the Voleian chibi NPCs, and I believe it took about 5 days to get it all done. I might be able to go faster now, but I'll keep my expectation at 5 to be safe.
I could also drew less combinations, where 2 heads and 2 bodies would result in 4 different outcomes instead of 9, to save maybe 1 or 2 days per race.
I'll add how long each choice will take between parentheses for clarity, but please remember that I often get these wrong. These are just my best guesses!
And so, this poll will let you vote for how many new races & combinations for chibi NPCs will be seen in the patreon demo:

1 - 1 race with 4 combinations (3 days)

2 - 1 race with 9 combinations (5 days)

3 - 2 races with 4 combinations each (6 days)

4 - 2 races with 9 combinations each (10 days)

5 - 3 races with 4 combinations each (9 days)

6 - 3 races with 9 combinations each (15 days) 

1 (= 1 race with 4 combinations) wins!

Random NPC encounters

Random NPC encounters are similar to fights, in that they have a chance of occuring when you enter a room in a dungeon.
They can have all sorts of effects, like a special shop, a minigame, a chance to send items to storage from wherever you are... Kind of like special floors of the object world in Disgaea.
For the Patreon demo, I'm thinking of having at most 3 different NPC encounters. One will involve Liv (the deep ocean Voleian), another the mimic girl NPC, and the last one is a secret (nothing too crazy!).
The Liv encounter is guaranted to be in the demo, but the other 2 will depend on this poll's results.
The secret encounter should only take 1 day to implement.
The mimic girl encounter would be a special shop and needs a few chibi sprites, it might take 2 days, 3 at most.

What would you like to see?

1 - Liv encounter only

2 - Liv + secret encounter

3 - Liv + Mimic encounter

4 - All 3 encounters 

4 (= All 3 encounters) wins!

Sound effects

Sound effects can't be underestimated! They add a lot to every action.
I'll need to make a bunch of new ones as well as update some of the old ones, but it might take 15 days to take care of them all, maybe even more. And so, I have a few options for the Patreon demo:

Some SFX, both old and new,  are more important than others, so I could only take care of the important SFX only. As for the rest, the new ones would instead be duplicates or have minimal work put into them, and the old ones that need to be updated would stay as they are. This would take about 7 days.
I could take care of the important SFX + update the old SFX that need it, which would take about 10 days
I could take care of the important SFX + the new SFX, which would take about 12 days.
Or I could do all of it, which would take about 15 days!

What do you think?

1 - Important SFX only

2 - Important SFX + update some of the old SFX 

3 - Important SFX + new SFX

4 - All SFX

2 (=Important SFX + update some of the old SFX)  wins!

There you go! I'll have a few more dev polls this month, and then we're going to switch to something else.

My goal was to now to place the cutscenes and add the multistate and harvestable objects I mentioned last time, but there are also some tasks I was delaying for later that I now think should be worked on at the same time. For example, I also need to add NPCs and quests, which the dev polls helped me figure out a bit. A few rooms will also need alternative versions of themselves. It's generally a minor change linked to the story, like a different background for a night scene, or a special effect, this kind of thing. It's not a lot of work, but it's gotta be done too!
And so, my current plan for April is now to finish that last cutscene set first (and to draw the last high priority chibis), and then to take care of as many of the remaining room tasks as I can, and probably finish that in May. Other than that, the rest is pretty much the same as last time!

And that's all for now! ^^