dreamteamstudio

re:Dreamer Alpha 0.13.0

Added 2022-12-13 17:50:22 +0000 UTC

Sorry for the delay, folks! Part of it is my fault with following through with an ill-convenience promise for a re:Dreamer asset pack for Student Transfer scenarios (I don't know why I try to bend over backwards to help a group of people who largely do not like me and who primarily write body swap and possession anyways), but also my dad had surgery on his back and needed me to bend over backwards to help him do things, and there was a lot of planning for the holidays, and I've been doing several dozen pages of design documents for the outline for Rich's route, Rich's sprites, the outline for Britney's route, Britney's director's (Molly's) sprites, Zach's mom's sprites, the secret lore, Zach's stuffed animal's lore, and something for a Friday Update on the 23rd.

re:Dreamer (0.13.0) is a fairly light release (especially compared to the absolute monster of a release 0.12.0 was with 2 hours of revised content and 2.5 hours of brand-new content), but it does two important things I have been neglecting to do for a while.

Changelog:

re:Dreamer has moved over from Ren'Py v7 (which is based on Python 2) to Ren'Py v8 (which is Python 3 based). The game overall runs a decent bit more smoothly (especially those laggy arcade games!), and while I did thoroughly test things (and got Espeon's help making sure things work), there is the chance I missed something important. This is a fundamental engine change that is going to break legacy saves, so the entire jump menu is once again unlocked to everyone regardless of a Patron password.
The long-neglected "Alone" route has been polished up, with the better care given to expressions, writing, C.H.E.A.T.S. paths, animations, and consistency on the level of the latest Keisuke writing. A good bit of the writing is the same, but it's a bit more... snappy, since it's some of the oldest writing that exists in the game, and I did tend to ramble and dance around getting to a point 3-ish years ago.
Most importantly, Haze's shitty old sprite is gone, and "Hot Zach" takes his place, making the selfcest infinitely more cursed. The CGs still need replacing to make purple placeholder Zoey finally bite the dust in all but the color variant in the sprites, but TiltSHIFT is doing the sprites for Zach's mom after he finishes his current work for the HCGs for the masturbation scene in Zach's dorm room before the "therapy" scene with Ai.
I fixed a bunch more of the songs to loop properly. This game's audio design is very important to me, and while I've been careful to use CC SFX for all the SFX that aren't from Umineko (it was still installed on my PC as I had just gotten done reading it when development on re:Dreamer had started back in September 2019), it's... going to destroy my soul to replace the soundtrack someday, but that'll be the very, very last thing I ever do for this game for full commercial release.
A few fixes of things I missed in 0.12.0, mostly small stuff like typos and expressions. As always, let me know if you spot any more.

I know the flowchart has become so big that it's gotten a bit blurry on export, so the online version can be seen on Google Drive/diagrams.net.

Next release should be on Friday, January 6, 2023, covering Zach getting a haircut, meeting Britney's pastor, doing his project for the compression bra, some of his Monday classes, and if I have time, linking the stub of telling Britney to come over to Zach's dorm room back into the rest of Britney's route to make it an alternative start with a penalty of making bPoints (Britney's affection points) harder for Zach to initially get.

Before I go, the eminently-talented Izumi drew this amazing fan art of Zoey hugging her BLÅHAJ.

So... Zach really likes stuffed animals, a guilty pleasures whose existence mortifies him as a 20-year-old man (and still kind of embarrasses Zoey as a 21-year-old woman). This will be an expanded world info entry later with the lore for these and the complex rituals Zach has for how he places them on his bed, but at the start of the game's story, his room back home has 13 stuffed animals:

A teddy bear he's had since he was an infant that his grandpa got him called K Bear (Zach's first attempt at a word was saying his greatly-cherished grandpa's name, Kevin, which his mom always called him instead of "Dad" or "Father-In-Law" because she didn't like the nosy father of her soulmate poking his head into how she was raising her son; Zach has to emphatically deny to Keisuke that the bear is named after his best friend).
An elephant (he's Ky Bear's best friend and Zach's second-oldest stuffed animal).
A dalmatian (Zach feels guilty because this was one he's had for a while and he understands the ethical issues of 101 Dalmatians' popularity mass-breeding dogs with chronic health issues).
A red bull (Zach really likes the bright red color and how this cute little guy isn't ashamed to be so vibrantly red).
A bald eagle (his dad picked this up for him on a work trip to America).
A moose (his dad picked this up for him on a work trip to Canada).
An ankylosaurus (his favorite dinosaur).
A triceratops (his second-favorite dinosaur).
A bunny (secretly, Zach's second-favorite after his teddy bear).
A cat (an orange tabby, not a black cat like Kurohime).
A tiger (Zach made this one by hand and fucked up some of the stitching, and he's often thought of asking Britney to fix it for him but is too ashamed to bring up the topic).
A clownfish from an aquarium gift shop (he has to keep it away from his shark or it'll get eaten).
A big blue shark (he has to keep it away from his clownfish or it'll eat it; Zach doesn't know that the shark is a huge meme in the MTF community but Britney does).