Mid-April Status

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen

I'm here with another status report. Let's dive right in.

Writing: Progresses smoothly. We are currently at 2.6k lines of pure text and we covered most of the events in town by now. Starting this week we'll get to writing the main-storylines about finding Richter's hideout and the Genovanno lab. All in all, the writing is gonna be as long as the previous two updates together. While the story isn't as focused as on the last two "pure-story" updates, it contains a lot of "Gina-weirdness", which is really fun to write again.

Art: A lot to do. Got offered new help and my SD is now finally a bit faster with a properly configured version of Forge. Our "show instead of tell" concept is just taking a lot of time, as we need a lot of images. Already 40 images in, including a few soul-crushers, and a lot more needed.

Coding: Unlike the last updates, this here requires a large amount of code again. Lots of events in town interacting with each other, implementation of the split story-arcs into the main story-path, the new town map, new items, a unit conversion script, changeable difficulty settings and lots of changes in combat are among our projects. A lot of this is done by now, but combat remains as the biggest challenge yet with a third combatant for Gina's group, new enemies, a raiding mode with randomized waves and the whole assault of the lab being worked on.

So we have our work cut out for us. Update will definitely not be around in April, as there is a ton of stuff left to do yet. But it won't be a small one this time 😁

Guess that was the important part... don't mind me though, I'll be ranting a bit more. Kinda like a continuation of the Dev-Diary for anyone who's interested in the thoughts behind it:

In general this update aligns more with the play-style of the previous open-world and adds some new concepts in the Streets of Rage. The raid-mode (aka. exploration and plundering of the Geno territory) gives us writers more chances of writing interactions between Gina and the Genovannos, for example meeting the beloved Assbringer again or Stella showing Gina a new way of "subduing" an enemy😋. The whole conflict with the Genovannos is a big part of the story and with this we can dabble a bit more into it.

But Don, can't you stay at one concept instead of changing the play-style and focus of the updates? Well... yes and no. I guess every player has their preferences and wants to see more content on his favourite type, especially if they only get a few hours of content every month. Sucks then if you're mostly here to see the main-story progress or to watch more naughty scenes, but instead half of the update is Gina-weirdness, cutesy scenes and combat. I mean, the core of Gina's Gym is still story-driven FMG and adult-game though, so those aspects should be present in every update while the other aspects are more flexible.

So while I want to stay somewhat consistent on a few aspects, changing things up also helps me to keep this fresh and interesting for myself. Writing the code for combat was a fundamentally different experience from writing scenes, making a stupid music-intro was a nice distraction and a change to learn something new again, etc. It's like when I start a new update, I always switch between writing, coding and creating pictures. After doing code for half a day I just long to make some pics and the other way around.

Ok, that should be enough. Just let me say again how grateful I am for my amazing team and the continued support of everyone here. This really means a lot to me and I'm happy to be a part of this community.

Have a lovely week everyone and I'll stay in touch. Bye.