DevLog Update

Hey all,

It's been a bit since I put one of these walls of text out for you so I wanted to check in. My goal for this past weekend was to have a thorough report out to the community on where things are at. Instead of working on that, I ended up prioritizing some pretty massive image changes that we'll talk about here in a minute. From a DevLog perspective, It's always more fun to share an organized presentation with the status, but the process isn't always 

So let's jump in and take a look at where things are at right now.

Coding and Organization (Previously I'd call this "Writing")

So the majority of the work in the early parts of the Revamp requires both writing and organizing the old code. Luckily, the last update was a little easier to sort through because of the long medical scene and fairly linear story after. This next update is starting Chapter 3 and it drops us back at the beginning of the day for tryouts all some of the same organizational nightmare that I had to do for the first few updates.

Now those of you that played the original game, know that the early parts required certain choices in a specific order to fulfil requirements to move the story forward. The Revamp is removing all of that. However, one problem that I've run into is that because of the repetitive nature of the original, there were many randomized encounters that actually happened. For example, when you walked into the dorm room: one of two random introductions may play each time; when you choose to study: one of 2 studying encounters may play. These randomized encounters replayed over and over until the requirements were filled to move the plot forward. With the revamp, there's no randomization. But this also means that certain randomized encounters that happened in the original game will likely get cut and lost to time. My goal for the revamp is to preserve as much of the original as possible, so I really want to find a home for some of these random encounters, even some of the more trivial ones. 

Right now, my solution has been to create a menu of choices when you come into the room or study, to try and give you an opportunity to relive some of these old moments. This is requiring a lot more organizing on my part, some of which may be skipped while you play. 

This can get pretty confusing so let's look at an example:

Zack may walk into the room and have a choice whether to do study or watch tv. For the plot to advance, choosing to study would move the story forward (so basically that's the "right" answer), but watching tv may play another scene first and then give you the studying option anyway, just to capture these moments. If you choose studying first, you may miss the TV scene, but that can just add to replay value for those that want more scenes. Obviously, this could easily turn into an image nightmare  but I'm hoping that we already have several images for some of these scenes that can likely be reused to save time (crossing fingers). 

Another example could be when you wake up in the morning, you could have a choice to go to the bathroom, clean the shower, or go to class. Only one of those choices would move the story forward but the others could result in extra scenes or more world building if you want the full Zack experience where you procrastinate as long as possible before going to class. This can also allow you to skip certain things you don't want to see. For example, if you don't like the bathroom sequence, you could still get the full story and not necessarily be forced into those scenes to progress. We saw this in the revamp at the beginning of Chapter 2. The difference with this chapter is there's just MORE of it right now.

CGs

This section is probably the most exciting to talk about. I won't type in all caps but just pretend like I'm vibrating when you read this. So lots of new images done so far. As of writing this, I have 175 in my finished folder and some of these images look fucking fantastic! So when I started this update, I didn't realize how image heavy I was going to make it. The chapter opens with Braden's first Tai Chi scene which is greatly expanded with new camera angles that are a huge improvement over the original. After that, we have a greatly expanded version of the swim team tryouts. For those on my Twitter, you may have seen me bitching about bubbles for like 3 days. The short story is that I was trying to do swimming shots, both on top the water and under, and I was really struggling. These were some of the most challenging shots that I've done so far. No one will probably notice and that's ok. If you want a full report on this, stay tuned because I plan to share the video sequence here before long in the $20 tier where I'll go into a lot more detail and share some of the struggles behind it. But, the swimming shots are fucking amazing with some pretty advanced lighting (for me, anyway), and some stylized action shots! I love them and it's been a long time since I've been this excited about showing off a Before/After set. But these shots are pretty cool. I learned a lot and hopefully that will continue to happen throughout the revamp. 

We'll also be seeing an extended conversation with Mikhail in this update during the tryouts and honestly, waaaaay more skin on Zack than I had intended (so Zack fans are gonna be happy). 

Current Percentage Progress

As I alluded to earlier, it's really hard to give a percentage of progress right now. I'm trying to sort through this old code and, while it was organized at the time, it's just not in a great order for me to string together into a linear story easily. So bear with me. I'm likely going to split Chapter 3 into two parts and I'm not exactly sure where I want to split it yet. So basically I need to organize the whole chapter, then figure out the place to split it for update 6, and then I'll know where I am on a percentage is. All of the work thus far for this update has started on the more linear part of the beginning of chapter 3 so I wanted to knock all of that stuff out first (i.e. everything through the swimming tryouts) and then start to try and organize past that point.

Other Stuff to Report!

So in between working on update stuff, I finally got a chance to redo my Patreon About page. This is the first page you see when you go to my profile. The old image there was really outdated, using lots of images from the original game, in addition to not fairly reflecting what I'm currently working on in the Revamp. So I've updated all of that to a fresh, cleaner look, that explains the project more maturely than I did back in 2017 when I started this thing. If you haven't seen it, go scroll down and take a look. It's more for new people but it is something that I've wanted to get done for a long time as another way to be transparent with the audience on what's going on over there. 

https://www.patreon.com/aaryn/about 

This is also sort of the start to me making more of a push to share the game or market it. I wasn't overly proud of the early parts of the original game and now that the revamp has started, I've had a chance to share my vision on how to correct that based on what I've learned. 

So what I'm saying is, if you're a Straight!? fan, things are only going to get better in the near future.

I've also talked in other mediums before about Mikhail's model and we'll be seeing a lot more of him in v0.06. Mikhail's model has been reworked quite a bit. He now has updated eyes that most of you probably won't notice consistently but they're more detailed with a lot more depth. We won't be seeing him shirtless in this update but his tattoo is corrected and will no longer intersect his nipple. Plus, his hair is fixed now and he actually has some. This will eliminate that stupid crescent-shaped glare that was on his head through the whole original game. I'm also working on some more things on him... uh... below the waist but we won't be seeing that for quite awhile. But it's been in the works and takes time so I chip away at it a little at a time. We saw him briefly in the doctor's office but he'll get a lot more screentime in this next update and I wanted to draw some attention to some of those changes so you can be on the look out moving forward. 

Last: over on Twitter, someone mentioned phone wallpapers related to the game characters a few months ago and I'll be making an official announcement regarding that very soon.

So stay tuned!

Next DevLog should be more concrete. 

Thank you, as always for all the support. Thank you for continuing to walk with me on this journey.

-Aaryn