2020-03-14 News and Sarah (NSFW)

Holy hell, I did not realize it had been so long since I posted some news. Sorry about that!

I guess I better take a moment and bring everyone up to speed.

Progress

I have to say that the play testing processing was incredibly successful. The last release went smoother than any before it. Thank you to all the $10+ patrons that tested the release and gave me valuable feedback on bugs and errors. That was the least amount of stress I’d ever experienced after a release and there were very few fires to put out. The majority of problems revolved around 3rd party patches that I have no control over. So bravo to all of you that assisted me with developing such a successful release!

Work on the game has continued and much has been accomplished in the last few weeks. Unfortunately, it’s mostly maintenance and development stuff that I can’t really stream or share until completion. But I’ll see if I can walk through some of the details here.

Music and Sound Fix

This patch is nearly complete. In the last few weeks I’ve retooled how music and sound are stored and activated in the game and I’ve almost completed implementing them throughout the game.

The system I’ve designed makes it easier for me to call on tracks, sound effects. Where calling an audio track or effect might have taken three or four lines before, it has now been reduced to a single line.

Thus making it faster to code and making my music and effects options more visible and easier to call. I can now adjust individual track volumes and effects and those effects will cascade and update everywhere they appear in the game. So if there are problems in the future with sound volumes or static, I can make the necessary adjustments in a single place and that will correct it throughout the game.

Implementing all that though meant going through every existing scene and updating the code there to comply with the new structure, but it’s almost done. Once it’s complete I’ll release a patch that includes the music fix and a few minor typo corrections, etc.

Look for that on the near horizon.

Words, words, and more words

I have devoted much of March to the development of the script. I feel terrible that I brought on three new artists and have yet to provide them with the steady flow of work I had intended. Truth is, I probably should have brought them on one at a time and then slowly expanded the crew as the available work became overwhelming. Hindsight you know?

So I’ve spent several days this month working on the scripts for Lupita, Cassie, Monica, Jane and Emily. I want to continue using this month to write and get as far ahead as I can so that going forward I can feed these wonderful individuals a steady stream of work that will drive the game forward and keep them busy with as much to do as they can handle.

We’ve lost one artist, but that’s alright. When this month is done I’ll have plenty for the remaining three to do!

Some new faces!

As part of that writing process, I’ve been developing a lot of new characters to dance in and out of our MC’s poor chaotic life. So far these are all side characters. But as the game heats up and I get into a steady rhythm with our 3rd party artists, there may be room to expand these rolls into new story lines.

Whether or not I expand some characters into full blown lovers rests on how well we keep up with our existing seven characters. If we find a steady pace of development where I feel we’re doing well maintaining the story we currently have, then I may host a poll to see which side character players want to see expanded upon.

One of the new characters developed for the Monica story line is featured in the image attached to this post. What can I say, the game needed a red head and the lovely Ms. Sarah Cartier was the perfect addition to the cast!

I try to make every character unique in appearance and personality and Ms. Cartier has some very fine qualities. I look forward to introducing her to you in Monica’s next chapter and seeing where things go from there!

Blender

Along side all of my writing, I’ve been studying several courses on Blender. I remain committed to carrying out this transition in the future but my recent studies have opened up new options for a smoother transition.

The introduction of new artists in the game has made the switch to Blender a complicated thing. At first I worried that eventually I’d have to seek out new artists that knew Blender to take over. But now I have a strategy for bridging between Blender and Daz so that I can continue to utilize the excellent artists I have now while harnessing the amazing power of Blender.

The final pipeline will look something like this. I send the Daz assets to the individual artists to do their work. They send it back to me. I then take that work and export it to blender for texturing, surfacing and environment work, and do the final render.

It’s the best of both world because by using Daz for all of the posing and base character design, I relieve myself of the burden of having to do full armatures and rigging in Blender. I can still make direct corrections and changes to the meshes once they’re imported (like fixing clipping hair), but the bulk of the posing will be done using Daz’s less complex posing system.

But wait, there’s more!

So far in the month of March I’ve completed over 18 hours of Blender training and I’m very comfortable at creating whole environments. I’ve studied how to built part libraries for rapid construction of new scenes using pre-built parts and I’ve already begun construction of settings that I always wanted but couldn’t find the Daz store.

One of these is a concert venue. I had always planned to do a scene where you take one of the girls to a concert, but finding the kind of set up, with the crowds, stage, music and lighting that I’ve envisioned has been impossible to find. Now I’ve built one from scratch, and it took far less time than I would have imagined and the results are exactly what I wanted! With each new course I complete, I grow closer and closer to the artistic freedom I have been hoping for.

So what’s the rub?

The rub is human skin! I have yet to find a simple, easy, and realistic skin for human characters that I can dress our girls in. At least one that I’m satisfied with. But that’s ok because at the moment I’m about half way through a 16 hour course on Blender Material Nodes and holy shit have I learned alot!

I’ve seen some pretty complex node trees that I thought looked very intimidating and complex. But with each lesson, that complexity is quickly vanishing away and I don’t think we’re very far away from having this problem fixed.

Once I’ve completed the course and started building my own skin textures, I’ll begin doing some tests on our girls to find the end result. We are still a few months away I believe from doing those tests, but fear not.

For now everything moves forward in Daz and we’ll continue making the game as we have been with 100% Daz work. I’m not stopping production for a moment! We’ll continue working on the Blender solution and we’ll get there when we get there, but the game must go on!

Android?!

Still a work in progress but there is progress. I’ve managed to adapt a couple of the menus to finally work on a hand held device, but the process is slow. Renpy’s Android emulator doesn’t exactly replicate how it looks on an actual device.

I know this because while I’ve built things to look good on the emulator, as soon as I compile and load it onto my phone, there are major differences. So it continues to be a slow process because the only way I can know a change is effective is to update the code, compile and install, and that circuit can take up to thirty or forty minutes on a good day.

There is a great enough demand for an Android version that I will continue to hammer away at this. And fortunately once it’s done and I have a solution in place for all my custom menus and screens, future updates will be quick and easy.

It’s just taking some time to hit the initial platform.

Goals!

We did it gang! We hit our first mile stone of $1,000! For that, I cannot thank all of you enough! Your support and willingness to contribute your own hard earned money this project is overwhelming and cannot thank you enough!

That said, I promised that once we hit this mile stone I’d devote time and energy to completing the “character sheet”. So starting next month I’ll spend a few hours each week building out this new form and see if we can get it implemented for the next update.

For those not in the know, the character sheet is basically an addition to the cheat options. Each character will have all of their variables and information nicely laid out on a screen that you can then use to manipulate their individual attributes. You can change their names, adjust their red and blue values, turn pregnant on and off, and all sorts of other stuff.

It’s just one more control for players to utilize if they want to and hopefully further ease the burden of broken saves (which were less of a problem this time, so hopefully that trend continues).

Finally, Streaming

The streams went on hiatus a bit while I devoted much of my time to writing. Writing isn’t really something worth streaming and would be more full of spoilers than the streaming the art is.

I plan to continue utilizing this month work on story, and then starting in April I will begin streaming work again. I will start with streaming the work on Cassie’s next chapter (which will include the opportunity for some full blown intercourse for those who want it), as well as streaming some of the environment creation I’m doing in Blender.

Like those streams we’ve done before, I hope they will be informative and interesting. At the very least it’s an opportunity for us to hang out, talk about the game, listen to some music, and chat about everything else going on.

I really enjoyed doing the streams and I look forward to kicking them up again.

Salute!

That’s about all I have for the moment. I am sitting on a full inbox and haven’t been on the forums in awhile. So if you’ve messaged me or have reached out on any of the open channels, bear with me a bit. I’m going to set aside some time next week to go through all the messages I’ve received and start handling responses. I appreciate your patience immensely!

If there is anything I missed or anything you want to know more about, feel free to post in the comments below, email me, or reach out on Discord. I always appreciate hearing from players.

Cheers, and as always, I salute you!