2020-05-12 News

Well friends, time for a bit of news. Lot going on, good progress and all around good news. I’ve been splitting my attention up between a couple different parts of the game. So for this news brief I’m just kind of shooting from the hip. Forgive me if I start to skip around a bit.

50 Shades of Cassie!

Work on Cassie’s renders are well underway. I’ve taken a few steps to simplify my art style a little bit to better facilitate speed. But this doesn’t amount to any kind of reduction in quality. As always, I try not to ignore the little details, as perfectly demonstrated in the teaser images attached for Cassie’s upcoming release.

In it, you have Cassie on the blue path. Sweet, innocent, dressed appropriately and above all wearing a bra. Then you have Cassie on the red path who may or may not be a little more influenced by the likes of Jane. Rocking the bra-less tank and just kind of letting herself hang out, she’s comfortable with her sexuality and makes not apology for it.

I enjoy adding this kind of variation to the game because it only takes a matter of seconds to swap outfits and doesn’t really add to the overnight render time. As time goes on, I’d like to add more and more little details like this based on your choices, but for now, I’ll limit myself to red/blue varieties.

The Bad News…or is it Good? You Decide

So when working on the renders for Cassie’s chapter, I got a little carried away as the story started to roll. Originally, it was supposed to be straight forward time with Cassie. A chance to talk, develop their plot line and eventually open the possibility of a romantic or lustful conclusion.

But as happens with me from time to time, the story snowballed and before I knew it the chapter encompassed optional sex with up to three different characters in a single play through. So now I’m triply excited to bring you Cassie’s next chapter because it’s going to be heavy in both story and sex. Oh yeah, speaking of sex…

The Sex Menu

As I began coding the first of said sex scenes, it became rapidly obvious just how cumbersome and unwieldy the programming for the sex menu was. I’ve been a programmer for a long time and one thing I’ve learned is that with a lot of coding, the first pass is just about getting it to work. The second pass is about debugging it and making it work without error. The third pass is about optimizing and trimming fat and shrinking down to four lines of code what previously took you ten.

Now that the story is rolling and things are getting to a point where I’m planning to have multiple sex scenes in a release, it was time to take that third pass and redesign the sex menu coding.

Now on the surface you’ll see no change at all. It’ll still work and function just like it did in previously releases. But on the back end, it does all the things it does with less lines of code, and more importantly, now instead of feeding it this oddly complex system of scene codes (I thought it was clever at the time), I can now just feed it a list of the labels for the sex scenes, and the menu will automatically break the labels apart and populate the menu accordingly.

So now, instead of managing all these funky jumps, returns and menu loops, I just hand it a list of scenes and off it goes. It takes me 1/50th of the time to program and I’m very happy about that.

The Awesome News

With the recoding of the sex menu I am getting closer and closer to completing the list of things that I felt needed tweaked on the back on end. With the exception of one or two minor things, I’ve about hit a point where 100% of my time will be devoted to story and renders.

The Music Controller. The Sound Effect Controller. The Character Data Objects. The Sex Menu. The Relationship Screen. The Custom Name Feature (For Every Single Character!). The Journal. The Modifiable Character Sheet (For Cheating your Ass off without the need for a console). Backward Save Compatibility.

These are all things that have been completed in the last two months and mark the near completion of the list of features.

I know it’s been a lot of work and I can’t thank you enough for your patience. But in the end I think it will lead to a better playing experience all around. And these are all things that I can carry forward into future games. So it’s an exciting benchmark to finally hit!

What else is happening?
Still working on Monica, Lupita and Jane at the moment. Within the next week or two I’m hoping to start posting up regular play tests as the scenes hit completion.

I’ve completing the v1.1.6 patch which has a ton of fixes and shit in it. But so far I have not heard one thing regarding bugs or errors. So either I let it loose and it’s worked flawlessly, or no one bothered to download it because it was all features and no content. Either way, I’ll be doing a public release of that soon.

It was necessary to get it done first as much of the new content I’m producing relies on features and code included in that patch.

In any case, I think that’s all I have at the moment. In the meantime I’m going to keep chugging along and hopefully get a live stream in sometime this week. I miss doing those and would like to put another together soon.

In the meantime, salute and thank you for playing! Cheers!