Author: SaltyJustice

UI Update Part 3

First up this week is the main menu, which has shifted formats a little. The menu grouping is now 5×2 instead of 3×3, the listing on the right is now wider so the catalyst information is less cryptic, and the character info is now spaced to handle exactly four characters.

I have also completed the first of the Vendor UIs. Borrowing the concept of putting the description in an F2 subwindow, more space is allowed for the item listing.

The UI now has a much cleaner comparison of properties and even shows how many of an item you have and who has it equipped.

I’m going to hopefully be able to finish the Sell and Buyback UIs very quickly since they borrow most of the layout and code from the Buy UI. The Gems UI will be completely overhauled.

Slitted Eye

According to Stinkehund, she has to make minor stuff to be placed all around the house and give it a lived-in sort of feeling. Hopefully done by the end of the month.

Import VHSs in the 90’s were pretty wild.

Charlotte draws stuff in her crafts room a lot. Sometimes the doodles are masterpieces.

We don’t have an ETA on Slitted Eye yet. I’m hoping to have it out by February, but that’s very tentative and not a guarantee.

Curious Cat

America’s Stupidest Home Link Pile Videos

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Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

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Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

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Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Get mad at the testers for feigning confusion when confronted!

UI Update Part 2

First up this week is the new Inventory UI. The layout didn’t change much, but the assets were redone and everything is now sized correctly since I know exactly how many lines are available for the given font sizes.

I also wrote some dynamic property generators so the descriptions will show the exact stats of a piece of equipment. These are shared with the Equipment UI but the Inventory doesn’t require a keypress to show them, and obviously can show stuff that nobody can currently equip.

If you have any suggestions on changes to this UI, now is the time to suggest them.

The Options UI has also been redone, standardizing the cursor and sizes with the rest of the UI. There’s also multiple pages now, accessed with the shoulder buttons (Q and E on the keyboard). This means I have plenty of space to add more options if people request them.

Oh but you don’t know what an option does?

Push F2 on an option and a detailed description pops up, telling you exactly what it does without cluttering up the UI.

This won’t prevent people from asking me what Tourist Mode does but it does mean they will look very silly when they do.

The program will also be much more explicit about the fact that changes are pending. If you attempt to press cancel with pending changes, you will receive a warning. You need to use the Okay button at the bottom to actually save the changes.

Most games use this standard for their Options UI but are (usually) more obvious about it. Now Pandemonium is too!

Art Attack!

One of the things about 3D environments is that you need to have junk lying around to make a space feel lived in. So Stinkehund has been making assorted junk to go in Slitted Eye. The models for the entire house and most of the characters are done, we just need to make it look natural.

Sadly, Hund didn’t make the globe texture have a knife sticking in the Soviet Union with red coming out to show the iron curtain. I have been assured that every globe made before 1991 had that decoration but never seen one myself.

Curious Cat

Fighting Link Pile Team

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Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

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Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Get mad at the testers for feigning confusion when confronted!

The UI Update Is Underway

I’ve made layouts for most of the UI upgrades and completed the Equip and Status screens.

The Status UI is pretty simple, but now a bit more open to show off the portrait of the character. Everything is now also correctly aligned and has some nice detail flourishes.

The Equipment UI is likewise more open to show off the portrait art. You can also use left/right to select gem slots directly, making equipping them and comparing things easier.

You can push F2 to see details of the item. I put some automation in to generate the properties on the bottom. Important for combat items since their properties usually can’t be described with just statistics alone.

See the comparison on the right and directly equipping gems. The replacement UI is also now in-stride with the other equipment instead of being its own window.

Curious Cat

Links? In my pile? It’s more linkly than you link.

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Get mad at the testers for feigning confusion when confronted!

Coding Stuff

As of now I have “done” the cutscenes I needed to do up until the party forms proper in chapter 2. I want to get the first village done and obviously have the combat outlined before I do a release.

However, the public voted for some exciting UI update action, so that’s my current priority.

Artistry

Remember those goofball artists? The house in Slitted Eye is now done, all we have to do is make the various enemies path around and try to murder you. Which is actually a lot of work so hey, back to the grind.

Curious Cat

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

Coding and Whatnot

Artist Chickenwhite got herself a new computer that no longer lags when doing 3D animation. So that’s a nice thing now isn’t it.

As far as coding goes, the third puzzle mechanic is now in, all I need to do is go through every map I’ve made and add clue spawners. So at this point it’s largely cutscenes, dialogue, and combat between me and the release. Speaking of.

Poll Results

Last week I asked the patron pals what we should do concerning Slitted Eye suggestions and the UI Update. Well here’s your damn results.

This means that I’ll be yelling at our UI artist to get me the last UI pieces and implementing it ASAP. I have to finish a couple things in chapter 2 first, and then I’ll switch over to implementing the UI.

Look at how generous our 5$ patrons are.

Starting today, there will be a patron post that I will link to in each update post where you can submit ideas. If you’d like your name on the resulting piece (should Koops choose to accept it) please be sure to put that in the answer.

Obviously.

Curious Cat

Way too many links! An unmanageable amount of links!

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

God damn it

It’s like deliberately tying votes is some kind of running gag with you people. Which means I get to decide and you get to see Statue Sanya this week if you’re a patron. You jerks.

Other Development

The artists are still hard at work on Slitted Eye. It’s coming along very nicely, but likely will not be done in October. There is a bunch of soundwork I’d like to do on it even if the animations are ready, and I want to spend a bit more time polishing this one than String Tyrant got.

I’ve “finished” the second of the big new puzzle mechanics that is going into chapter 2’s introduction. I put finished in quotes because it can always use more polish and bugtesting, but it works and is playable. It’s even kinda fun and the puzzle generator stumps me, the guy who wrote it, every now and then!

This means there’s one more major new mechanic, a few cutscenes, and all of the initial combat (there are three playable party members in the intro!) and then we’re ready to go on chapter 2’s introduction.

Curious Cat

Way too many links! An unmanageable amount of links!

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

Odyssey of Gianna’s release date is September 22nd

Hey remember that game? That one that Salty shilled for? It’s coming out this week.

Here’s Vhiel’s patreon post with some more details.

Having played the game myself, I (Salty) being a tester for it, I can say it has my seal of approval. It has monstergirls, it has transformation, and most of all it has game design and a story. It’s actually fun to play. Hard to believe I know.

I did a cross-promotion to this almost two years ago in October of 2019. Since then a pandemic got in the way but now it’s coming out and you should go play it and enjoy it. If you liked Pandemonium you’ll probably enjoy this. Maybe. I’m not the boss of you.

Other Development News

Koops has now finished all of the concepts for the introduction of chapter 2. I’ve moved her onto making stuff for Slitted Eye. Expect to see Space Lesbians With Ray Guns, The Movie soon.

I’m almost done the second puzzle mechanic set of chapter 2. This one is a bit more involved and will probably have lots of lovely bugs for me to fix, but I think it’s pretty fun and inventive.

Chicken has finished her part of the upcoming commission release. That means she is now back to making 3D models. She is hoping to fix up Urimas’ cat model attempts.

All of the artists are now working on Slitted Eye. We hope to have a playable demo by the end of the month.

Curious Cat

The Big Link That Makes All of the Rules

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

Fresh New Kicks

Tired of all those block-pushing puzzles that other games have? So are we? As such, Sanya kicks the blocks to move them.

This is basically what game design is.

I’m still working my way through the intro to chapter 2. Block puzzles are completed, the first of three new mechanics in chapter 2’s intro. There’s even more new mechanics later in the chapter, making it a doozy to code. Chapter 5’s big thing was just lighting, which is was less complex than kicking blocks.

Curious Cat

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

Development Roadmap

Someone asked for a roadmap, so here it is!

Slitted Eye Promotional Image!

All of the artists have been redirected to Slitted Eye work in order to get the game out ASAP. Our goal is to have it up in time for the Spooky Season. I’m still working on cutscenes and scripts for chapter 2 because most of my coding job is done until I have animation renders done.

Curious Cat

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!

HOLY SHIT FAN ART

Source.

If you want to make Salty very happy, fan art is how you do it. Also the artwork is just superb, somehow managing to be colorful and joyful despite rilmani being literally none of those things.

I’m (Almost) Done the Maps

That’s right, the intro section to chapter 2 is almost mapped. I need some more tiles from Urimas and then it’ll be time for all the glue, scripting, characters. You know, everything that is not placing tiles.

I’m feeling pretty good about how the maps look and feel so far. Very adventure-y.

Slitted Eye Progress

I made a simple internal prototype using sample animations. The engine is “Done” because this kind of game doesn’t actually do a lot under the hood. We’ve also finished about half of the rooms and Urimas’ next assignment is to make the animations for the first level.

And we even got Mario to write some copy for the answering machine messages!

Curious Cat

I snuck a secret cat into the curious cat images. Did you see him? He saw you.

The Link Pile

Argue about this post on the forums!    Discussion thread for String Tyrant!

Maiden Sealed in Stone, a game Salty translated!

Buy our dumb gaiden game on itch.io! It’s on Steam too!

Ask us questions anonymously on Curious Cat!

Buy our merch on Redbubble and Teepublic!

Give us money on Patreon so we can make more monstergirl stuff!

Join our Discord and curse at me in person! Hunt our testers down like dogs. Dogs!