It needs work, but it's all functional.
In terms of graphics, character portraits are finally a go. Check it out:
The pink is RGB 255, 0, 255, the usual alpha channel for games and other things. (It's used because it's highly unlikely that anything else in the image will use that color).
There is a portrait template for male and female characters, so I can streamline the process a bit. There's a bit of fixing to do on this character (look at the left arm) and just general stuff to make things neat, like moving everything a little bit to the left. During dialogue, one character will be on the left side of the screen, and another will be on the right. I've been playing around with the idea of two people being on the screen at the same time, with one grayed out/in the background, but I'm not entirely sure yet.
Programming-wise, massive work has been done to basically everything, making it absolutely as streamlined as possible. I fixed a strange glitch where dialogue boxes and portraits would be drawn over each other if the dialogue method was called within the same script, which was the most annoying part of development yet. Basically, all the work I'm doing right now is to make the rest of development easy. Comparatively.
A big thing happened in terms of hardware recently, too. For a while, I was using my MacBook Pro with Parallels, using this little program called Pixen for pixel art, but everything was running really slow. So, I took all the project files, and moved them to my desktop. Now, I'm using Photoshop for all the pixel art, and mostly Ableton Live for the music, except for a few songs that I still make on Logic Pro. Everything's kept updated on Dropbox, because it's great.
TO DO:
Make the prologue sequence (not really important at present)
make more character portraits
Finish up sprite templates (most important)
make some ambient/background music
Oh yes! Check out RPG Toolkit, which I've been using to make this game. It's free, the scripting is in C++ (roughly), though I'd suggest you try one of the Community Rebuilds of the engine as the official release is a bit weird. http://rpgtoolkit.net/
