First, I'd like to say I'm pretty psyched about all of the interest in For Skin & Scale that's been generated over the last week or so, even without the first build being out! In my announcement post, I forgot to mention a few things about android support. I also said I'll be making a post when I'm mostly satisfied with the user interface. In a way, these two things are tied in together.

Below you can see a quick mock-up of default Ren'Py versus what I made

(right click and view in a new tab for full-size comparison)

I found a great asset pack that had everything I was looking for(and lucky me it was on sale :p). While the asset pack had, well, assets it was not made for visual novels. I got to flex some of my (quite intermediate) photoshop magic to make something rather nice if I don't say so myself! I'm really happy with how it's turned out so far, though there are a few things I might end up refining over the next few months.

Portrait - Side images

The bottom left corner is where the speaker is. Based on context, you'll see the face change. This is similar to how the main sprites operate, but sometimes the speaker will not have space among the other sprites above.

The vertical space allows for characters with horns, or fat heads, to take up as much space as they need!

Buttons

I found the default Ren'Py buttons to be all, just sitting under the dialogue like they own the place. The available buttons have been swapped to six things I find most useful. We now have Save, Load, and Hide on top - with Skip, Back, and Auto tiny underneath. Like seriously, why is the hide button not a default thing? (Though, I might add a 'gear' icon with the bottom row to reach preferences easier)

(The tabs on the top do a little 'pop up' when hovered to reduce screen space!)

You said something about Android?

Sure did! My good friend Kaiju let me in on a little secret: Based on polling, half or more of people who play VNs from Itch tend to prefer playing on their mobile devices! This means having an Android version ready on release is a must. This isn't some kind of RPG-VN hybrid, so I highly doubt I'll run into any technical issues. It was pure pain to get everything I needed to port versions to Android, but I am a man of the people!

But on a more serious note, since there are a few things I plan on changing around with the UI, Android version might not look all fancy on release. I know I know... but mobile requires it's own assets (stuff that is smaller, for the smaller devices) and I would not enjoy needing to make every change for both versions. I'm learning how to do pretty much everything on the code side of things as I need to, and positioning UI elements use all code. So mobile will get the UI when I am satisfied with the PC version.

But to be clear: Android will be supported and playable on release

That's all for this week, thanks for reading! I'll try to release some kind of devlog every week or two until the prologue is out for public! It is expected to be ready later this month for patrons and two weeks after that for free on Itch!

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