If you've been following this dev blog for a while, you may recall at the beginning of the year I announced that, along with converting this site into a dev blog, I'd be spinning off my other creative efforts into a separate brand, then called Shaft. However, due to potential confusion with a Japanese studio of the same name, I was strongly advised not to move forward with that branding. Well, it turns out coming up with names is hard, but after days (and days, and days) of bouncing ideas around and checking on their availability, I've finally settled on how to move forward. Oh, and don't worry: VNgen is still making progress too. All this and more after the jump! A new name Considering the title of this post, there's not much point in delaying this one. As you probably already figured out, this new brand I speak of is (drum roll please)... ... XGASOFT ! What you may not have figured out, though, is what it means . XGA stands for "International Game Arts...

As you may have noticed, it has now been four weeks since the last devblog as opposed to the usual two. A couple of weeks ago, I had some personal matters come up that put a halt to much of my usual work, but all that is now behind me and I am happily back to my regularly-scheduled programming—literally! On top of that, big things are happening behind the scenes which will surely pay off over the course of the summer. But in order for much of it to happen, VNgen needs to be completed—and this past month has been huge in working towards that goal. Find out how after the jump. A matter of character(s) As previously mentioned, character attachments provide a way for VNgen to composite multiple sprites in real time to create highly custom characters. Of course, more drawing comes at a cost, and since then the drawing pipeline for this process has been optimized greatly. Speed is important to VNgen, and while it simply won't be as fast as Edge VN because it does so much more, this new...