Last month's results and planning for this month

I  want to start by sharing with you some very good news, I received a very generous donation from our friend Jersson to buy equipment for the development of the game. I intended to purchase before disclosing this to you, but it's been so long since I've bought computer parts that I didn't realize how crazy the prices have become, but with the donated money it will be possible to acquire a motherboard, a powerful CPU and a good amount of RAM. So I would like to thank Jersson immensely and ask for a round of applause for his tremendous help!

This week I added ambient occlusion to the shader, if you watch the video you can see how the shadow of the hair and clothes is well defined on the skin of the characters. This occlusion also prevents the backlight from reaching covered areas, such as the inside of the mouth. I also added the parameter for the focus control in the scenes and made some modifications to the hair shader.

During the month of February, I worked with the intention of defining the overall look of the game. The new shader gives me all the control I wanted and I can finally say that my real-time characters look like animated illustrations and not puppets. The challenge now is to use this potential to create attractive scenes.

One thing I didn't get a chance to complete was the UI changes, this would be necessary for the new Brendon scenes I intended to do this month, which would use a lot of his phone and computer. However, I don't want to delay any longer in continuing to add content to the game, so I think it's best to put Brendon aside for the next update and focus more on Nicole and Barney. I know many are more interested in Brendon's content, but this way I can balance the characters.

I plan to release an update by the end of this month, which will not bring new content, just the changes and fixes made so far. I would like this update to bring translations into other languages, but for that, I still rely on volunteer translators.

I'm going to redo the first two demos with updated graphics and experiment with AI voices on characters, I want to know how viable this is before trying to do this in the full game. If possible I also want to release Demo 3 by the end of this month, probably containing the opening scene of Step 3.

Thank you for all the support you have given me. I wish you a great weekend. See you!