I completed the scene from which an excerpt was shown two weeks ago (I believe that it was)--a tavern in which we find our protagonist sitting at the bar, perking up when her ear catches a scrap of story from nearby, a scrap of story of particular interest to her.
The next scene sees her arrive swiftly at the story-teller's table, demanding information.
It's a fairly simple scene, but I'll confess that some of the poses gave me a little trouble--in particular the two in which our protagonist leans forward on the table.
The scene was originally intended to be black-on-white. This proved a problem, however, when it came time to add speech-bubbles: the white bubbles were lost against a white backdrop. For a while I considered adding a black outline or secondary backdrop to the bubbles. In the end, however, I instead reworked the scene's backdrop, painting it in browns similar to those of the tavern walls in the preceding scene. Aside from rendering the speech-bubbles visible, I feel that this has the advantage of being rather less stark, and of connecting this scene to the setting of the previous.
As with the previous, this scene is now done, I believe.
The first of the two scenes described above--the protagonist in a tavern--was originally to be the first scene of this cutscene--as shown above, it no longer is: a new scene has been inserted before it, tying off the events of the prologue.
The brief text used in this scene is somewhat of a violation of the "show, don't tell" principle, I'll confess. And indeed, I had previously intended to close out the prologue with a short, dedicated cutscene that might better have shown what this tells. However, I feel that these opening cutscenes are already getting a little long (indeed, this cutscene has three scenes yet to be shown--albeit that one is a brief establishing shot). I don't want to add too much more passive viewing to the start of the game.
(I'm also perhaps a little anxious to get to work on the first level itself!)
Implementing this new first scene presented a minor challenge: While appending a new scene is easy, neither the cutscene system nor its editor were designed with insertion in mind--a bit of an oversight, perhaps. Support for scene-insertion might be a useful feature to add, but I'm not convinced that it's worth the development time at this point.
So, how then to add a scene to the start of a cutscene? In the end, it was fairly simple: I didn't. The first scene remains, technically, the first scene--I just extended it, offset the starting times of all objects belonging to the original first scene, and added a black overlay to simulate the usual inter-scene fade.
This, too, is now complete, I believe.
All of this done, I've made a start on the next scene of the cutscene: an establishing shot of the Archive at Teli. It makes for a nice change of pace, being fairly broad and simple--and having no human figures. It does, however, include the return of grass; once again I am engaged with my old enemy, although I think that I may have the upper hand for the moment. But grass is a tricky foe, so I hesitate to call a victory just yet...
As a side-note, none of the cutscenes yet have sound or music--something that I have in mind to go back and add later.
Finally, I toyed a little with the texture used for the in-game sky, using an approach taken from my cutscene painting. While I've reverted these experiments (they were just quick proofs-of-concept), the approach that I was testing may provide an improvement to the sky's appearance, should I get around to repainting the texture in earnest.
That's all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^