It is time for another devblog, seems like I was writing the previous one just the other day, but no, another week has passed. Most of my free time that I had last week (which I didn't have a lot) I spent working on the dressing room functionality for the game. This was something that I was planning to have in the game right from the start, but was putting away, since I was hoping that we will get to the more revealing scenes in the game sooner and thus the dressing room will make more sense then. But a year has gone by and even though we are very close to our first real scenes with the main cast, we are still some time away, and it feels like I cannot really put such important and enticing parts of the game as the dressing room (and soon the Gallery) away for much longer.

As I touched on in the previous blog entries, even though I initially tried planning and making the sprites for the girls so that they would be compatible with the dressing room, a lot of my inexperience did make coding both for the normal gameplay scenes and now for the dressing room much more difficult than it was necessary. So now, when I am coding, I am also trying to untangle the issues with the naming convention that I made up for the girls' clothes and bodyparts, without breaking the already existing scenes.

For example, even though girls' bras and panties are separate images in the game files. The way I initially set them up, not only led to them always appear as a pair, but also made it so that the game always loaded them by default. So if I wanted to keep the existing code as is, I needed to create a blank dummy image that would load when the girls are not wearing either bra or no panties.

The same was true for shirts, skirts and other clothing. Basically I set the sprites in a way that a default state for them would be completely dressed. It definitely made things easier for their campus scenes, but made things more complicated for later scenes and now, the dressing room. As I was moving through development, I made less and less clothes load by default. Some clothes are still set as default, but I am afraid that the rest will have to go too. It will make the coding for "dressed" scenes a bit more complicated since I will need to remember to type in every single piece of clothing for each girl, but it should make the other parts run smoother. Or maybe I will discover a better way to do all of this by that time and will have to redo all the work again. And since you really don't need to see those when the girls are dressed anyway, none of the girls will likely to wear panties from now on.

On the bright side, even though the dressing room is more or less just a lot of busy work, with coding dozens of buttons and making sure that the images they are calling are all correctly named and set up, I did discover a way of coding them much easier. That was something that I had already used for the character creating screen and nowhere else, so I forgot that I did something like that. I already coded several dozen buttons in the most unga-bunga way possible, before thinking that maybe what I used there, would work here too. I tried it, and it did work! Drastically reducing the number of jumps and actions that I needed to perform for each change of clothes for each girl.

So as you can all probably see, this is all still very WIP, but that's mostly all for now. Hope you are exited for things to come! 

I'll see you next week.
Shady Character One, out!