Progress Report #26 - July 10, 2022

Howdy folks!

Gonna keep it general this week, as that is pretty much where we are at in development.

As I said, last week was stuffing the queue. I got about 90 in by the end of the weekend and have rendered 80. Unfortunately, 15 of them had a lighting snafu that I didn't catch since they rendered while I was asleep. Luckily I caught it before it rendered all of them. I'm currently in the midst of running a test render on the first one and then will go through and reset the rest to match and then get the queue running again.

This weekend has been all about finalizing a bunch of stuff. I've gone through all of the elements for the first 6 scenes and have done the spot renders needed, all the image post work needed, and tightened up all of the code.

One thing we haven't discussed much is our abundance of dynamic images. The game will have a lot of little animations throughout to make the story feel a little more cinematic. Because of this, we've run into some issues where it's easy to accidentally skip a huge chunk of story if you play the game like a standard VN, clicking like a madman to get to the good bits. So I've had to figure out a few things coding wise to make the experience a little more instinctual. As it stands right now, I feel like I've got it all running pretty smooth. I'm very interested in finding out how this aspect is received as I can't think of any other VN that does these to the extent we do.

The Mighty Evite helped us implement a scene gallery on Saturday, so we've got that in place. It's looking really good and I'm happy we we're able to get it in for the first release. Thank you, Evite!

Pretty much all of the UI is locked in, unless something rears it's ugly head in testing. All of the logic is sound so far, again unless something rears it's head in testing.

So, the plan for this week is to finish up all of the fixes for Scene 7 tonight and try and get as many of the additional renders I've found into the queue and hopefully finish it up within the next couple of days. I'll also begin posing and rendering Scene 8 hopefully early in the week and try and have most of the game rendered by this weekend early next week.

I've found a proofreader, Lapdragon for anyone on Discord, and will be getting the script to him this week to begin that process.

Once all of that is complete, I'll need to do a few splash screens for a tutorial and the standard warning screens. I'm on the fence about including credits on the first release as I need to figure out how I want to do them and they aren't super necessary. I may wait and add it in as a patch after release. We'll see where we end up on with time. I'd rather you all be able to play the game than be waiting on me to figure out something most players will skip. 

So, a lot going on in the final weeks. I'll talk with you next week with some more general numbers and hopefully concrete plans for the release.

For the higher tiers, I will work in the lewd render as time allows over the week. Right now, I'm hyper focused on all the minutia of the game and want to keep rolling. So, you'll get some surprise nekkidness sometime this week.

Thanks all and have a great week!

Wilson