WEEKLY POST - July 13th 2025 - Now in Technicolor!

Hey guys! User-Interface changes: Let's not waste time and get in the meat of this week's progress.

Hey guys!

User-Interface changes:

Let's not waste time and get in the meat of this week's progress.
During the Weekly-post for June 29th, I mentioned how I changed the textbox color for Elena from lavender to cyan (technically, it's "Peacock Blue" but you know what I mean).

As a reminder, I made this change because the color of Elena's hair and eyes is cyan and I felt like it made less sense now for her to have a different color for her textbox, ESPECIALLY if I was going to introduce Morgane later, who's eye-color is purple/lavender. It made more sense for Morgane to have the lavender textbox UI, and for Elena's to be tinted cyan.

Here's the preview from June 29th:

This however raised a big issue : every bit of UI in the game is lavender tinted as well, because I like the color purple. It made no sense for the game's main girl to have a wildly different color than the game's overall UI. It made even less sense for a secondary girl to have that color.
So I knew that sooner or later, I would have to deal with the issue of re-tinting the entire UI of the game.

I could've done that quickly and just recolored everything on Photoshop in a hurry, sure, but I decided to spend actual time improving some things, especially in regards to feedback given by the UI to the player. Things like sounds when clicking or when mouse-hovering buttons, colors highlighting better what's mouse-hovered and what's activated/enabled.

In this week's video, above, I showcase most of those changes. I did some fixes, too, and a bunch of improvements to my code.
An example I'm happy about is how I handled the two quickmenus (Features and Utilities). Before, their colors and opacity used to be done with Photoshop. So a single button used to have a lot of image files for all of its states:

Now, those are handled via code, giving me more freedom if I ever want to tweak the UI colors further.

For example, the little lock symbol and the diagonal red line are now separate files, but I layer those on top of other buttons:

This also allowed me to delete 50% of the image files I used for the quickmenus. Not that it makes much difference in actual file-size, and aside from the color changes, you won't notice a difference (which is the point) but it still feels better from my standpoint.
I'm sure some pros coders would've looked at how the menus were handled before with wide eyes while cursing my entire bloodline.

There are a few more small adjustments to be done, but I'm happy with the results.

As I said in the video, I know it's not as exciting as NSFW animations, but I feel like this is a thing that had to happen, and I think it's better if it happens now instead of, say, in a Chapter 2 update.

Small art additions:

Nothing major, really, but yeah, I've added this static sprite for Johan looking outside the lab to check if the inquisitive Elise is gone:

It's used for like two clicks, so I thought it wasn't worth trying to animate anything about it.

Plus, making sprites for Johan is a pain in the ass. The AI model I use is GREAT for girls, but for guys, it generates them in a lot of different styles (from more painted-like to more cartoony), so it's like playing roulette. For Chapter 2, I will probably have to rework his main animated sprite a lot because I'm NOT happy with it, and I already know I'll have to make a 'casual-outfit' variant anyway, so I might as well make it a 2-in-1 deal.

Then I've added a sprite for Alex's family photos, which shows you what Alex's parents look like. This'll alo give me an opportunity to sprinkle tiny Lore bits about how Alex got into chemistry:

The good stuff:

As I'm writing these words, it's Sunday 1:35AM, well into the night, I have less than 14 hours before my usual Weekly Post schedule time. I still haven't started working on this week's animation for Elena, I'm tired and I need to sleep... Future-Gobbo's problem, now!

EDIT from future-Gobbo:
Fuck you, Past-Gobbo.

So I feel like rushing an animation for the sake of having a weekly one would be a bad thing. This is why this week, I'm going to focus on the base stage of cleaning sprites for animation later. What's below is going to be placeholder and the final animations will have some differences.

Little bit of detail on the process : I'm not using AI to remove backgrounds, I do it by hand because AI tends to randomly leave artifacts, or remove details I want to keep, or have the edges a bit blurry...
On a static image, that usually can work decently... but for something I will animate, something that will move in front of a background, then this doesn't work at all.
So I prefer to remove the backgrounds by hand, to have sharp edges. That way I know if there's an issue, it's because I fucked-up, not some AI mistake I overlooked.

Then I have to recolor Elena's hair because despite my best efforts, I've only been able to get a slightly greener tint with a lot of yellow highlights for her hair via AI.

Next I'll make a quick edit of her panties to keep the pattern consistent-ish, and I'll have to do more editing later to improve the details on that, as well as reworking things like her back muscles, make some edits to her veins for them to make a tiny bit more sense in places, etc...

After that, the actual clean-up for animation begins, when I'm gonna start cutting all the pieces, extending those which are behind things (like the hair flowing in her back), remaking what's behind things that are meant to move (like the bits of her abs behind her hands on the double-flex one...

Once that's done, I'll jump on Live2D. So I'm going to try to have AT LEAST one of those above pictures animated for next week, as well as other things I want to do.

My to-do list for next week is:

• Making Alex's apartment door background.

• Getting back to rewriting the conversation segment with Elena.

• Working on her Inspection segment to add more things (view from her window, her gaming displates, rework of the photo of her and her mom which still shows the old Elena design).

• At lest 1 animation based on the 3 pictures above.

That's it for this week! Have a nice Sunday, and cheers!