Update 6's first devlog: the awaited feature!

Hey hey!

Aaaalright! After the successful launch of Update 5.5, I took a little time to breathe and catch up on everything else I have going on, but it's just about time to resume development!

Since Edwin's day ended up taking longer than planned, I already had the events coming in Update 6 in my head and in development for quite a while! Some things here or there are done and defined so that the wind-up to start is shorter this time. Speaking of shorter, I know I say this a lot, but... I would like to keep Update 6 on the shorter side so that it can come out faster. I'm trying hard to make that happen and I swear, in one of these updates someday, I'll succeed! I swear!

In the meantime though, despite wanting to make it shorter and everything, the number of features I want to bring out keeps being the same. For Update 6, since it's a brand-new and honestly quite special one, I think it's about time that the culmination of my efforts sprinkled over the last two updates finally comes to fruition.

I know some of you are more interested in knowing some tidbits about where the story going in Update 6 or which characters we're gonna be seeing a lot of, but you'll have to wait a bit for further devlogs and some of the assets to be done! I'll have previews coming very soon, as I already promised, and the first one will already be big. ;)

For now, you'll have to hear me ramble about other features, and the feature that I've been wanting to get out the most for people is, of course, the sprite viewer in the Memorium.

We're gonna peruse Resnick's memories even further and see people as he remembers them! Once a person's entry has been unlocked in the Memorium and, if that person is someone that has a sprite and everything, you'll see a new icon on the top left of their entry:

Aaaand, once you click it..

Ta-dam! The arrows next to our bear friend here allow you to cycle between all available (unlocked) body and head variations that they have. That means you'll be able to position them in any state of dressing (or lack thereof) combined with any expression you want. If you've been wanting to see more of anyone in the cast then now, through Resnick's memories, you'll be able to stare at them to your heart's content without having to hunt them around in the story through your saves. ;)

I mentioned the word unlock, right? Some sprites and even expressions will be locked at the start. There are a lot of things that Resnick just hasn't seen yet at the beginning of the game, you know? As you progress through the story though, much like with memories themselves, you'll automatically unlock new variations as you manage to see them in-game as Resnick! Just like with memories, once a variation has been unlocked once, it'll persist even if you load or even delete that save. No problem there!

Here's another screenshot of a combination that reminds me of a certain Discord sticker. It shows how you'll be able to make combinations of states that you don't see even in-game:

I like Captain Garret...

At any rate, do keep in mind that this feature is still heavily in development! I have the core of it, which was by far the most complicated thing (and most complicated thing I've ever done in the Memorium so far), all done. That being said, there still so quirks I'd like to adjust here or there and a lot of setup to get all those sprites we have so far in there. It'll be done by the launch of Update 6, but with that being said, keep in mind that the visuals shown here are a WIP and might be changed before the end!

Still, I hope you'll like the sprite viewer in-game! I wonder who people are eager to see in what state from the cast that has been seen so far?

This is what I had to show you for today! Next time, as it will be a bit more developed, I'll talk a bit more about what to expect story-wise in this update to the best of my ability without giving any spoilers. I still have a lot to do, but I think I'll be able to get this one out relatively quickly! We'll see!

As always, thank you so much for your support and interest everyone! <3