Hi! 👋 it's been a while since the last devlog, so here's a quick recap!

I worked on Opona pretty solidly from September 2019 until the demo came out in May 2020, then I took a break for a few months. 

But I started working on it again recently, and in January I actually got a lot of stuff done?? So I wanted to update you on what's new!

1 - Sprites 🥤

I'm redrawing the sprites! Basically i watched like one video about anatomy and then decided to redraw the sprites because I felt like they were a bit stiff,  but also I felt like they were getting lost against the background, so I decided to outline them a bit more.

They also blink now which is new and makes them feel a little more alive I think.

2 - Backgrounds 🏨

I'm also redrawing some backgrounds, these aren't noticeably better, just kind of different and closer to what I was imagining.

3 - Point & Click 👈

Until now, the exploration sections of the game would show you a list of options that you could pick, but it felt a bit weird. As I started drawing more backgrounds I wanted the player to be able to click around and explore the environments... so I changed it! Now it's more like a point and click, you can hover over objects and your cursor will change to show that you can interact with it.

4 - Talking 💬

The characters now have voice beeps! This was something that I thought would be hard, but ended up being pretty easy.

 Their mouths also move when they talk, it felt slightly weird that everyone's mouths were just closed all the time, I hope that this, along with the voice beeps, will help make it clear which character is talking. This is something I thought would be easy, but ended up being surprisingly a lot of work considering I have to draw multiple animations depending on whether the character is smiling or not...

5 - Logo ⭕

This is a minor thing but, I changed the logo! I'll still use the more decorative logo sometimes, but I wanted to make another logo that was readable on dark backgrounds and at smaller sizes (like in thumbnails and stuff). Here's a pic of both the fancy and the simplified logo, along with 14 logo rejects that didn't make the cut!

Ok, that's about it! I might make another one of these in February if I get some more stuff done. I'm making a lot of changes to the battle system, but it's definitely the hardest thing to work on coding-wise so it might be a while until I can show it off... 😅

If you're curious at all about the game then you can check out the playable demo, it's quite different to how the game is currently, but I'm still proud of it!

See ya next time, bye!! ⭐