Ren'Py Under Your Spell [Development Thread]

[Shady_Character_1]

Hey, everyone! This is my first post here and also the start of my devblog, I guess.
About a couple of month ago me and my friend started working on our first game. It is called "Under your spell", and it is going to be a 2D VN-style school simulator based in a magic school loosely inspired by the Harry Potter universe. After a spell-gone-wrong, you will have to carefully plan your school year: attend classes, raise stats, balance part-time jobs and leisure, to survive a dangerous tournament, and most importantly find yourself a girlfriend.

What to expect:
RPG elements - the way you create and develop your character will effect the story and end results.
Time management - you will have to spend your time with care.
Plot - the game will be plot-driven and will have a complete narrative.
Girls - a variety of girls to interact with and potentially date (we are planning to have 4 at first, but the full cast is planned to be 11).

What NOT to expect:
Porn - this will not be a purely porn game, though it will have plenty of lewdness and sex.

We are currently moving steadily to our first demo build. Until then, I will try to post some progress reports and teasers here.
If you have any questions - I am happy to answer them.​

 

[Shady_Character_1]

Some work in progress sprites for our four initial girls. Only two of them are in their school uniform, and to be honest, the uniform is still a subject to change too. But we are planning to have several main outfits for the girls like "uniform", "casual", "winter", "sports" and maybe a few variations.

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[Shady_Character_1]

I am not sure if I will keep it a weekly thing, but for now I will try to keep it up.
The first alpha-build is coming up nicely. Slower than I was initially hoping for, but the progress is steady.
The art is the slowest part of course, but a lot of groundwork on both characters and interface is being done.
For the first build we decided to focus on the first month and a half of the school-year, and mostly on the beginning of girls' story-lines and the main plot. There will be a few random events, but only a few, since it will take to much time to make the art for.
Random events and different "companion mechanics" like shopping, learning spells, part-time jobs and the like, we will leave for future builds.​

 

[Shady_Character_1]

Ok, let's see how far I will be able to take it. Week 4
Today's update is on the progress of UI. Even though it is still in design stages, the first iteration of the interface is already here.
This is the main room from where you will plan your day. Ignore the backgrounds for now, they are just generic AI placeholders, but they should convey the general idea.
Tell me if you can spot the difference
How it was a month ago:

How it is now:

Take your time, the differences may be very subtle.

So far, making the back-end for the interface was probable the most fun part of the development process. Constant cycle of adding new features to streamline the way it interacts with other systems, which adds a lot of code, and finding ways to optimize the code that makes everything work better. But it is about 90% done now, at least for the initial build, so I will need to find other ways to optimize now.

And here's a bonus image of an encounter with a wild witch-student:
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[Shady_Character_1]

Ok, another Friday, another another update. Nothing really major was done this week:
Character sprites are being worked on (have about a dozen more or less completed ones)
New events are being written (about 30 events are finished)
Really hoping to push out our first alpha build this weekend, which will include the events of the game up until the first major event.
Btw, what's the stance on using AI generated images these days? I was thinking to using some AI backgrounds as placeholders for now, and I was thinking whether we should instead use some sketch placeholders as AI is being frowned upon?
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[Shady_Character_1]

Hey, everyone. New update on the work Under Your Spell is here.
A LOT of things have been done in the last week. Most importantly is that we made our first alpha build and had it tested by a few people with lots of positive feedback. And some of bugfixes and typos, but most of those were fixed withing a couple of hours.
Second major thing is that I finally had ironed out the calendar system, for such a small part of the game, it has taken the most amount of code by far. Most of it is copy-pasting, and I am pretty sure that there was a much more elegant way to do it, but that's how I made it, and it works. It show dates of interest, keeps track of your plans, and generally helps you plan your school year

Another major improvement is that we finally started adding in the girl sprites into the game. With different clothes, expression, blinking eyes, and all the other bells and whistles that most of you probably expect to see. The sprites themselves are not yet 100% finished, but they will probably be by my next update, so I'll be able to show them off without fear of retribution from the artist.But what I did end up implementing completely is out best friend Eric, who sets up the start of the events of the game, and who follows you to whatever School House you choose at the start.
Eric from Cairngorm:

Eric from Dunagall:

Eric from Ruachan:

Eric from Talamhdan:
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