It feels almost surreal that its been months now since the initial release of the Dawn of Ragnarok Prologue. It's been met with more attention than I frankly expected, which I'm quite thankful for, and I've been ever-pushing forward on this project, even despite setbacks (like getting a mysterious illness and being knocked out for most of March) and progress is going fairly well! Though, even just Part 1 itself is a big thing, and this is a solo project, so it might not be available to the public for a while.

That said, I wanted to share some updates and little things from the development so far, to show that I've still been working on this and a bit of how progress has been going.

First off, the UI has received a bit of an update! A bit of the UI in the prologue is shown on one of the screenshots currently on the main page (probably subject to change when Part 1 eventually comes out), showing the title screen and main menu.

It's pretty close to the default Ren'py menu design, and I wanted to make it look at least a bit nicer, so I changed some things, altered colors, etc. Here's an example of the title screen with the updated UI.

It's not a big change, but I think it's fair to say it does look a bit nicer than before. Other UI elements have been changed as well, too, but I'm not going to link a bunch more screenshots just yet, because I have other things I want to talk about here - such as animations!

Now, I'm not really an animator, though the prologue does have a small amount of very simple animation (just alternating colors, really). But recently, I put together the likely first example of a slightly more complex animation, at least by my standards. Here's an example of it in motion (because of how Ren'Py handles animations, I had to capture this from the game itself and then turn that into a gif, so apologies for the lower image quality).

It's pretty rudimentary, but hopefully these kinds of animations will serve their purpose well to add a bit more movement and action to certain scenes.

To give a bit of an example into the length of what's been worked on for DoR Part 1 currently, the script file where all the narration and dialogue and the like is kept is currently more than 3700 lines long. (For reference, the Prologue ends and Part 1 begins at around 1200 lines. So Part 1 is currently longer than the Prologue, and still has a ways to go before just the writing of it is done, let alone all the images!)

Speaking of images, there are currently around 100 separate images used by this project. (Note that this also includes animation frames, such as the 7 used for the previously shown animation) That's quite a few! Sometimes I wonder if my decision to use individual drawings instead of just character sprites on backgrounds like many other visual novels was a good idea; but in the end, I think it gives the story the freedom to be a bit more dynamic. Plus, with the introduction of more human-sized characters and the like in Part 1 and beyond, character sprites just probably wouldn't work with the differences in size and body shape of some characters!

Anyway, that's probably as far as I should go on showing off my progress here; any further, and I might end up spoiling things!

If you want to receive more sporadic updates on DoR progress and/or just want to see me occasionally spout random things and sometimes post content, you can also follow me on my personal Twitter (warning for explicit adult content, though; more explicit than in DoR itself).

I hope everyone who has played the Dawn of Ragnarok Prologue has enjoyed it, and I'll do my best to keep working on Part 1 and get it out to the public as soon as I can!

~ Celia