Slimegirl chibi reveal + Devlog #099 + poll results (Patreon)

And finally, Slimegirl chibi!

I'm especially satisfied with this one, to the point where she might be my favorite chibi set. Her nature as a slimegirl required quite a bit of details, with all the reflected light, the light patterns, and of course the blobcats. She becomes bigger overall as her rank increases, and figuring out a way to save as much time as possible by approaching this in a clever was a gigantic pain, to the point where I just said "fuck it" and simply started drawing her. I ended up super inspired and drew her pretty fast, despite the amount of details! The size stuff will be taken care of eventually of course, but that's something for future me to figure out. For now, I'm just glad I finally drew her! ^^
And with that, that's all the high priority playable chibis taken care of! Unless something changes, the rest will be done post patreon demo. This means that the next devlog will instead reveal new NPC characters and their chibis!

This devlog is going to be on the shorter side, but before I talk about anything, here are the last dev polls' results:

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

Alchemy puzzles

This one is pretty straightforward!
It's hard to tell exactly how many new alchemy puzzles I'll need for this demo, but I'd say about 20, which would take 2 to 3 days.
How many should I make?

1 - No new puzzles

2 - 10 new puzzles

3 - 20 new puzzles

3 - 20 new puzzles wins!

New items

Between the new spells, relics, trinkets, alchemy ingredients and more, I'll need to draw a bunch of new items. With the exception of spells, I have the option of temporarily replacing some items by color swaps of other items instead of drawing new ones! The result would be something like the Fire Gems and Water gems in the demo.
It's definitely not as interesting as finding new items, but it would save some time.
It's been a while since I drew the items from the demo so my guess may be a bit off here, but let's say it takes about a day to draw 10 different items. I'll need to draw about 40 new items (not counting spells), so it would take about 4 days to draw them all.
Here are the options this time:

1 - 10 new items, 30 color swaps (= 1 day)

2 - 20 new items, 20 color swaps (= 2 day)

3 - 30 new items, 10 color swaps (= 3 day)

4 - 40 new items, 0 color swaps (= 4 day)

2 - 20 new items, 20 color swaps wins!

Credits

Can't forget about the credits! And, in particular, the Patreon credits. I want to thank everyone who supported me, but I'm sure there will be a few cases where someone will want to be credited under a different name than their Patreon handle, or maybe even not be credited at all. I'll post a special announcement on Patreon later for more details about that.
As for what this poll is about, I have a few option for what to do with the credits:
A simple low effort static image containing everyone's name. This would take 1 day, probably even less.
A classic credit roll with text moving up. This would be a bit more work, so let's say 2 days.
A decorated credit roll. Nothing excessively extravagant, but nicer to look at! 3 or 4 days of work sounds about right for this.
Which one would you like?

1 - Static image

2 - Classic credit roll

3 - Decorated credit roll

1 - Static image wins!

And that's all the devlogs! I might do more later if something else comes to mind, but that's it for now. I initially figured I'd make that special announcement for the credits as soon as the poll was over, but I think it would make more sense to wait a bit more before that after all.

So! I started the month by drawing the Slimegirl chibis. I was working on making rooms before that, and since the last cutscene set I wanted to tackle required a bunch of very special ones, I figured I'd start with that since it was still fresh in my mind. After a few days of work, these new rooms were all finalized, and I started to work on the actual cutscenes. I started with the easier ones as a warm up, but after some time, I realized the game compiling was starting to take a really long time, over 5 minutes every time (which becomes a problem when compiling over 30 times a day). It wasn't an issue when working on the rooms since I'd just leave my editor open without a need for recompiling, but I didn't have a choice when working on the cutscenes, resulting in several hours lost every day. I think my old laptop is slowly but surely dying, I'll need to invest in a new computer at some point. However, I'd heard of a certain GameMaker extension some time ago that supposedly lets you reload code in real time, without having to recompile. I was planning on looking into it more once the demo was out, but the compile wait time was becoming unbearable so I decided to do it right away.
The extension in question is called GMLive by YellowAfterlife, and I truly can't recommend it enough to anyone working with GameMaker. After a day of figuring it out it ended up working pretty much without any issue, and it has already saved me an enormous amount of time. In fact, I'm not even sure some of the stuff I made for these cutscenes would have been possible without it. At the very least, the level of quality I reached was only possible because this extension makes it absurdly easy to reload code. In short, it's amazing ^^
It was the best possible decision, but the cutscenes still ended up taking more time than I expected once again. They're definitely worth it and I think this is a series of events that anyone who plays BEW will remember, they're just a lot of work. The good news is that while I'll need some of May to finish the cutscenes, I also figured out other ways to simplify the work left in other areas (the Shapes in particular), which evens out the additional cutscene delay. So my release date expectations are unchanged! For now!
But yeah, I've been busy to say the least. Once these cutscenes are done in about week and a half, I'll draw the 2 new NPCs as a result of the NPC dev poll, which will give me something to show next time. Then I'll start working on new Shapes (I'm thinking of making 10 new ones for now), new items, new spells, implementing the new enemies, etc. I'm putting off fleshing out the rooms for now (= adding secrets, npcs, cutscene triggers etc) since I feel it would be smarter to take care of that other stuff first. I'll have a clearer view of where I'm at by the next devlog, so I'll make another list of tasks per month then, like I did in the Imp devlog.

Also, now that the dev polls are over, I've started the alt costumes polls! Basically, these serve to determine which characters will get additional costumes, which you'll be able to switch in game.
You can find more info about the alt costumes in the "info" channel of the Discord server!

Here are the results of that first alt costume poll:

1st - Ghost girl: 98

2nd - Vuu: 66

3rd - Nightmare: 63

4th - Living armor: 56

5th - Kitsune : 54

6th - Fairy: 43

7th - Dullahan: 36

7th - Hydra girl: 36

7th - Slimegirl: 36

10th - Amazon: 28

11th - Cat girl : 24

12th - Scylla: 23

13th - Gravitar 02: 20

13th - Yuki-onna : 20

15th - Cow girl 01: 14

16th - Goblin: 13

17th - Raptor girl: 7

18th - Kobold: 6

19th - Dragon girl: 4

20th - Bat girl: 3

20th - Cow girl 02: 3

20th - Lamia: 3

20th - Sphinx girl: 3

20th - Succubus: 3

25th - Roswell gray: 2

26th - Court of pixies: 1

26th - Saen’Liz: 1

28th - Coatl: 0

28th - Cosmic horror girl: 0

28th - Gravitar 01: 0

28th - Imp: 0

28th - Manticore girl: 0

28th - Mud elemental: 0

28th - Plant girl: 0

28th - Puzzle girl: 0

28th - Rose: 0

28th - Shark girl: 0

28th - T: 0

28th - Tiger girl : 0

28th - Trilobite girl: 0

28th - Zombie: 0

Ghost girl wins! She'll be the first character to get an alt costume! Thank you for voting ^^

It was interesting to see everyone's favorite, but I do feel like there were too many options, so I'll change the way alt costume polls are structured from now on. This first alt costume poll was made up of a single round. For the next ones, I'll instead do 2 rounds to reduce the monstergirl pool, and a third one to determine a winner. Some of these rounds will be popularity based, others will be tier dependent.

And that's pretty much it for now! See you ^^