Friday!! Yay! FriDAY! FriDAY!

As always, on the personal side, all has been well. The little one is healthy and growing and it's surreal to think that we'll have a new family member in a couple of months! <3 Power outages are still a thing, and they will continue to be a thing for at least another year if not longer, but life is life, and I'm still privileged enough to have a roof over my head, and a laptop with a battery that generally lasts throughout the outages, which is more than most people can say.

On to the main feature, Infinite Stars!

We've been struggling to get the optimised version of the new expressions working via the code, and as of earlier today, we had a breakthrough! It's working! With the blinking animation! Soon the whole crew will be blinking idly at you while you read their dialogue. It's not a huge thing, but it makes a difference. Just like the mid-sentence expression changes (which are a pain to script, by the way!), it makes the characters feel a little more alive. Special shout-out to Trix who has been amazing during this whole process!

It took way longer to implement than I thought it would, but now that it's in, we can continue scripting!

Lochem's scene is coded, as is the continuation after the cliffhanger, and all the side branches for the different love interests. All that still needs to be done is assigning the actual facial expressions.

The new crew member sprites are in various stages of being implemented, and now that the new expression system is working, they should all be in the game by end of next week. (By the way, I've uploaded some new emoticons of all the new sprites on our Discord server if you wanted to steal a sneak peek at the new crew faces!)

I know some of you are reading this and thinking "Cool!" before clicking away, but I'd like to put what we've done into context. When I launched Infinite Stars, we had a total of 6 expressions for each character. Later, we changed that to 9 expressions for each character. I don't know if you can recall this post from last year, where split the mouth and eyes of each character, allowing us to create 81 different expressions. By splitting the eyes and eyebrows for all the human characters, we've now upped the 81 expressions to 810 different expressions, not including the blush layer. (The characters can blush, which actually makes it 1620 different expressions each, but I feel that's cheating a bit, even if it's technically true. Also, some characters have an additional wink layer, which again ups the 1620 layers to... you get the idea.)

I've included a VERY large reference image of Katya's new expressions for you to browse through all the nuanced emotions she can now display. It's not perfect, and some expressions might still change, but here it is! (Another shout-out, this time to Odikeraz who created these images to help me reference/code the expressions faster!)

Lastly, I don't do a call to action like this very often, but if you want to enable me to create even more cool stuff for Infinite Stars and Draegan Herald, please consider becoming a Patron. I realise $3 or $12 can be a lot of money, depending on where you are in the world, but even a custom recurring pledge of $1 adds up over a few months. I love pushing the boundaries of what Infinite Stars can be, and with your help, the potential is truly infinite!

Have fun, stay safe and enjoy your weekend!