I'm back in the (GB) studio! After a needed break and time to pursue different hobbies and navigating some big ups and downs in life, as well as various design docs, scripts and prototypes that haven't quite blossomed into full development projects, I've been getting back into things with one personal project I've wanted to do for a while - The Heart of Arel DX. Basically, colorising my original game!

But I wanted to strike a sensible balance between spending a really long time into turning the game into something so ambitious that it won't leave me time to work on a second game, and just adding colour and calling it a day.

So here's what I'm aiming for:

• Full colour (GBC exclusive ROM)
• More portraits
• Another pass of the dialogue
• A couple of updated music tracks
• Unlocking the world map early in the game, as opposed to towards the end
  • My intent was was to encourage natural exploration through the game, and then encourage the 100% completion towards the end for those who would like, but ultimately I'd like to give players a fuller sense of world and place while playing the game for the first time
• Rework the logo and commission some cover art
• Flash some physical cartridges to properly immortalise it

One thing I'd learned in retrospect was my dialogue engine - while I am a software engineer by trade, I didn't really go too far in the JavaScript plugins department once my dialogue boxes were working. I'd modified them heavily from a lesser-used dialogue plugin, but it served my purpose nicely of having character portraits that were baked into the dialogue itself (and thus drawn into the font), rather than being an extra actor. This meant less worrying about z-axis clipping and other performance issues.

So I ended up with events looking like this:

Yes, really:

Since then, I've learned how to dynamically change the font, so I can actually just have one font set for each character. I don't need to customise the avatar or name characters or anything in GB Studio itself - now they're just variables within the plugin script. Take a look at my dialogue plugin here! Now instead of having a javascript for every character portrait, I just have one for each character, and I can handle many portraits within each one.

Now my plugin is much more customisable and flexible. I've also added in a palette swap so each character has a colour palette that matches that character!

I'm having a lot of fun working on it whenever I get a spare evening and can't wait to get the rest of it done!

Thank you for all of your lovely supportive comments, on itch and elsewhere, since I released The Heart of Arel <3

Erika