Long sheep NPC reveal + Devlog #101 + poll results (Patreon)

We had small sheep, now here is long sheep!
I'm extremely happy with how she turned out. I originally had the idea of giving her a tired expression, but she ended looking cool. She might be the coolest BEW character so far, even!
I really liked the idea of giving her a long upper body with big booba :B Her top turned out to be a big pain to draw, but I think it turned out really good. I'm very happy with the feeling of weight, too.

Before I get into the thick of it: The third alt costume poll has ended! After 3 rounds of voting, Slimegirl won! It was a very close, and Nightmare got second place by a hair. I was planning on going back to NPC polls until the demo's release, but I'm enjoying the alt costume polls a lot, so we'll do one last bonus one this month!

So, I made a bunch of very good progress this month! I said last time I was going to work on Shape related stuff. What I didn't mention is that part of this was a minigame of sorts with gameplay similar to shape fights. I won't go into too much details, but it was a very important part of the game, and actually a pretty sizeable chunk of work. It's completely finished now and I can't wait to see the reactions to this. I'm pretty sure this is going to be something that everyone remembers ^^

My plan after that was to add new shapes, but as I mentioned in previous devlogs I was having trouble with compile time taking over 10 minutes each, which is ridiculous. I did install an incredibly helpful extension allowing me to update code in real time, but it still didn't fix the original issue.
The reason it was so slow was that I was working on an 8 years old laptop (maybe even older than that). Getting a new computer was another thing I wanted to do after the demo's release, but it would just have been too much time wasted to wait until then, so I decided it was time to invest. I received the parts and proceeded to build a PC for the first time in my life! It was very stressful, but I figured it out. I installed everything I needed on it, and compiling the game now takes 2 minutes at worst! Needless to say, I'm extremely happy with that improvement ^^

I was then finally able to add new shapes. I've added 3 so far, as well as a bunch of new shape waves (for the shape fights). I figured that would be enough for the time being and that it would be smarter to focus on other tasks from here.
Also, here are a few small improvements that I thought were interesting enough to bring up:

- The bonus block that sometimes appear in fights is something I've always had some trouble figuring out the appearance of. If you've played the old demo, you might remember it used to look like a very ugly grey block. In the current demo, I updated it to a magic circle of sorts, but I still wasn't satisfied with that. Somehow, I had never thought of simply making it a special oyon. All that to say, the bonus block is now a new type of oyon, the rainbow oyon! Wooo!

- Switching blocks now looks more dynamic

- Small freeze frame when a shape is destroyed

- Shape cores now always spawn within the screen, even if a shape is stunned outside of it.

- Continuous fire is now activated by holding the space bar and deactivated by releasing it, instead of a toggle.

- Enemies now have an almost full shape summon circle at the start of a fight.

My next step is to implement all the new monstergirls and placing them where they actually belong. No more goblins and zombies underwater!
I've already figured out each one's spells and summoned shapes, as well as a rough estimation of their stats. There's going to be some cool stuff :B
I don't expect it will take very long to get all of that working, too ^^

We did hit a few speed bumps in the musical side of things, which required some of my attention, but progress is still being made despite that so I can't complain!

As for the release date, I initially said that it would be around August, give or take a month. I want to stay true to that no matter what, but I've come to understand that until the game is actually done, nothing will ever be truly perfect. What I mean by that is that in order to respect that release window, there is a possibility that I'll need to put aside some aspects of the game (dev poll related or not) for that next demo. Of course that's something I'll do my best to avoid, but after taking a step back I realized that even as things are, there IS over 3 years worth of new stuff compared to the previous demo and what I'm used to would be new to everyone else, including the main story, so it would be fine to release it even if I can't add absolutely everything I'd want to in time.
Again I'll do my best to avoid that, but I wanted to say that the possibility is there in favor of the release date. And so, here are 2 TODO lists, a non optional one that takes priority no matter what, and an optional one where I'll try to clear as many tasks as possible before the end of September.

TODO list (non optional):

 ̶-̶ ̶N̶e̶w̶ ̶M̶e̶n̶u̶ ̶N̶P̶C̶s

- Add and update monstergirl fights (currently working on this!)

- Draw secondary chibis (aka important NPC chibis)

- Draw tertiary chibis

- Draw & implement new items (ingredients, spells, relics, trinkets and more)

 ̶-̶ ̶D̶r̶a̶w̶ ̶&̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶l̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶s̶h̶a̶p̶e̶s

 ̶-̶ ̶I̶m̶p̶l̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶s̶h̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶w̶a̶v̶e̶s

 ̶-̶ ̶C̶r̶e̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶e̶x̶p̶l̶o̶r̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶r̶o̶o̶m̶s

 ̶-̶ ̶I̶m̶p̶l̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶c̶u̶t̶s̶c̶e̶n̶e̶s

- Fully finish rooms (chests, puzzles, cutscene triggers)

- NPC dialogue

- Party interaction system

- Party interactions (some)

- Random NPC encounters (some)

- Music

- SFX

- Various other changes (a bunch of minor stuff that's not really worth getting into here, like block types per area, item prices, etc)

TODO list (optional):

- Chibi BE

- Party interactions (some)

- Random NPC encounters (some)

- Quests

- New Alchemy puzzles

- Almanach descriptions

So yeah, that's all I got for now! We're now at a point where pretty much all remaining tasks are small enough to be cleared in a few days. I know I said all this stuff about the optional tasks, but to be honest, I think it's looking pretty good! I'll be revealing various NPC chibis next time.

See you! ^^