Character equipment and hair styles

    Having your character be able to wear clothes other than the default set was in my to-do list since the beginning. However, while drawing the standard animation frames for the main character, I realised it would be a much bigger undertaking than what I originally thought.

    You see, right now the full animation set of the main character has 170 unique frames. Even if we subtract 50 frames having to do with the character's legs, because if we want to draw a hat we'll skip those frames anyway), we are still looking at 120 frames. So for each piece of equipment that isn't a simple color switch, I must draw those 120 frames from scratch. Sigh...

    Granted, in some frames the main character has the same orientation, so I could escape drawing stuff from scratch by copying and pasting from a similar frame, but still. When you are dealing with so many frames, even thinking about redrawing or copy-pasting takes time!

    Fast forward one week. That was a lot of clicks in my image drawing program. A lot. But hey. We now have a bunch of clothes, hats, armor pieces and boots!

    I have also decided to make some equipment sets grant bonuses when fully worn. As always, I hate it when in a game everything swims in a homogenous grey soup of balance. So there are clothes of trivial value, which don't make any big difference if you equip them, but there are also powerful pieces of equipment that grant cool bonuses. Depending on how you play and what you decide to explore first, there is no guaranteee that you will stumble on the weaker equipment first.

    I've also created several hair styles for each gender, as well as finalized the female base sprite. Being an idiot as usual, I fiddled with the size of the arms size in certain animation frames, requiring me to make variations of some equipment for each gender. But hey, I'm past it now, moving forward.

    If I may inject a more contemporary remark, recently Valve has begun dropping the Banhammer on a bunch of Shovelware games. You know, these low-effort, asset-flipping pieces of crapware that get re-released on the Steam store with different skins, passing for a different game?

    It's sad seeing that some people have actually "earned" (more precisely, "gotten away with") money from selling non-games whose development cycle was probably even less that the time I spent drawing hats for my stupid little game. Just think about it!

    Anyway, I'm currently finishing the crafting system, as well as finalising the "rewards" from each villager for each level of friendship you manage to reach with them. In general, I'm mostly left with connecting various infrastructure elements with each other, adding some optional areas, making the rest of the music tracks and adding sound effects. That's still a lot of  work, make no mistake, but hey, the finishing line is on the horizon!