My O2A2 2025 submission is done!

Nearly all of my audience is developers by design, so there's not much to see here yet.  We used Live2D in the PC version and pre-rendered Live2D expressions in the web version.  Based on some digging I've done, the licensing issues surrounding Live2D discouraged the use of the SDK to complete the physics implementation in RenPy, so we couldn't get her hair to have the same satisfying bounce without recording entire motions and baking the physics into the motion files.

We'll be releasing Mint separately for people to pick up and use in the near future, along with some tools for managing bubbles in a more sane way.

A couple things we used:

•  The Make Visual Novels Renpy Shader Pack, specifically the SimulatedLighting on both Mint and the background, with the perlin noise shader on Mint herself to give her some persistent motion.
• The Smart Barks pack, to make the chat bubbles pop in.
• The Make Visual Novels Text Shader Pack, specifically for the burning text effect used towards the end.  I actually wrote a new blur shader for text because I was too lazy to do that at first.  Then after I did eventually get around to it, I realized I didn't have a text blur effect in that pack.  Task failed successfully, I reckon.

• We started to work on an implementation for lipsyncing Mint, at least to the point where she opens her mouth on her spoken lines.  It *mostly* works, but I couldn't come up with a method of getting it to play nice with the Smart Barks, so we dropped that functionality.  We might revisit it later, but with RenPy's physics limitations at present, it's unlikely to be any time soon.
• I anticipated needing the Stage pack.  Wound up putting it in but I really didn't need to, as Mint never really moves from her position beyond the limits of her LIve2D movement, which is fine for now.