Pics 128: Bedroom Nudes

October was a busy stressful month IRL, but I've cleared the decks for November to focus on my games.  I've got 3 projects to bounce between. First, I'm starting the voicing of Ariane in Paradise, Second, I want to generate a broad outline for my next game, and third I want to learn Daz better and produce more test images that I can share with you patrons.

The second is my NANOWRIMO project which is a november writing project they do every year.  Hope I don't ruin anyone's No Nut November with the pictures.

On the third front, I'm trying to focus on a major theme: Nudity in the Bedroom. Got what I hope is good lighting, and the three images have different depth of field settings as well as poses. First has none, second has wide, and the third is narrow.

Voicing Ariane in Paradise

I started working on voicing Ariane in Paradise on November 1. This might take longer than I thought.  Ariane in Paradise is the first visual novel I did with comic book positional text instead of  traditional visual novel bottom with name text.

The problem is it uses non standard coding to do it. Player text has "quotes" around it, and NPC text is color tagged instead of character tagged. First thing I need to do is change all of this to standard "Date Ariane Games" format: Get rid of the quotes and the color tags and replace them with character tags, which I am borrowing from Date Ariane Remastered.

I'm also finding a lot of experimenting with menus in this game, resulting in unnecessary menus the choices of which are based on the player gender, so there is only one choice that shows up.  I can just change this to if..then..else text which formats things better.

I'm re-coding it as much as I need to to get AiP to work like the other 3 games, but it means it is going to take longer to voice.

It is also going to mess up the Spanish translation.  Not in an unrecoverable way, I don't need anything re-translated, but when I change a lines format, renpy is not smart enough to also change the translation to the new format.  That means searching for the original translated line and copy pasting it to the new translation.

While it is possible to voice the translation, too.  I'm not sure there is enough interest for that, but I want to keep the text translated if possible.  If you are playing in Spanish, you will see Spanish text but English voice, which you can turn off.  I plan to release an update later this month for patrons, it will most likely just voice the first day.

The next game

The basic gist of the new fifth game is Date Ariane, with a new character Relay, and set in the future.  Been trying to find a good title.  The most obvious is "The Future of Dating" but that sounds more like a college lecture title than a game title.  My current workshopping title is "Dating Frontiers" or "The Dating Frontiers".  Sounds like a game title and says what the game is about. Would love to hear other opinions or suggestions on this.  Leave comments!

As for the game itself, I'm thinking Date Ariane, but with activities replaced with futuristic versions of the activities.  For example, instead of a museum with static pictures, you go to a museum with virtual environments, like a Star Trek Holodeck.  I have similar futuristic ideas for most of the Date Ariane activities.  It won't be a perfect 1:1 recreation of Date Ariane.  I want to spread it out over 3 dates, and involve other characters that I presented back in September.

Date Ariane was made over several years with new activities attached rather crudely.  I want to figure out how all this works first, so I don't waste time when I actually make it.  I also need to design it with release chapters in mind so I can release parts every so often on Patreon as I make them.