Mini-Update 2019-05-08 (NSFW)

I know it’s been a hot minute since the last weekly update. Know that I haven’t forgot, and I’ll make good on that and some streaming very soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share some of the latest progress.

So it’s scaring me how comfortable I’m getting with renpy screen language. I was able to put this together in about three hours tonight on the laptop while the beast is cranking out renders.

Taking much of your feedback to heart, I’ve revamped the sex menu system and made some serious improvements to the interface.

1. The boxes have been made semi-transparent and are much less jarring to the eye.

2. They dynamically resize based on the amount of content in each box.

3. The individual menus can now be manually opened and closed via the arrow in the upper right of each box. This means if you have chosen a location and position for example and just want to explore all the stimulations, you can save yourself some space by collapsing the other two boxes. The game will remember which boxes were open and closed each time it is opened.

4. The menu remembers the choices you made higher up on the hierarchy by darkening the text of the previous selections. This too is remember each time the menu is opened.

5. The entire menu can be expanded or collapsed at any time via the icon in the upper left. This means that in the middle of a sex scene you have the option of jumping tracks to a different one if the current scene just isn’t doing it for you. This icon only appears during sex scenes and will be absent during the rest of the game, freeing up valuable screen space.

6. You can terminate the sex scene complete at any time, not just at the end of a scene. Thus giving you complete control over the experience.

Other suggestions will be implemented at release time. We always intended to include better transitions between locations and positions to create a better narrative flow. So that is already in the pipeline and almost complete. We’re also going to scale back the amount of text during the sex scenes. It will be a fairly even combination of click throughs and looped “pseudo-animation” of about four or five scenes.

That said, the reason I’m excited about this system is because it is a lot less work on the development side. The reusability of it alone is going to save us from having to manage all kinds of loops and jumps that tend to get buggy as they get bigger. It also makes developing sex scenes a little more formulaic which requires less planning overall. I now have the freedom to just come up with four or five smaller sex scenes that I think are appropriate and feed them into the menu.

Our new batch rendering system is also capable of doing camera changes between renders. This means we can set up our six or seven sex scenes, set four or five cameras, and then just let the computer take over. It’s a far cry simpler than before when ever frame needed to be saved as a separate file and rendered out one at a time.

We can also program in a few minutes of downtime between batches for gpu cool down. This means we can leave the computer on autopilot for longer periods of time throughout the day and that’s going to help us render faster.

I know the development speed has been ebbing and flowing a lot lately and that’s largely due to team reduction and that other job I have encroaching in on my free time to work on the game. But rest assured, development never comes to a stop. Some weeks may only have ten to fifteen hours, others I eek in twenty five or thirty.

I know everyone has been waiting extra patiently for this next update. I won’t try to placate you with estimations or promises. But know that I will not stop!

Thank you all again for your patience. It means a lot that you’ve stuck around this long. I hope to reward that patience very, very soon!

Salute!