Laura: Lustful Secrets chapter 1 - days away from beta

Hello, thought I'd give you a progress update on Laura: Lustful Secrets chapter 1! Here's where me and Dark Anu are at:

Every scene has been scripted, rendered, translated, and is fully working in-game.

The release is 100% ready from a content and pure gameplay standpoint. In this release are:

• 57 scenes

• 306 videos

• 354 other renders

The download will come in around 1.6Gb.

Work on the collectibles (there's collectibles!), secret scenes (there's secret scenes!) and the gallery is complete

All accessed through Laura's new phone; progress the plot and find the secrets!

The waitress minigame is very close to completion

Remember the minigame concept that I posted here? This is what it looked like then:

This is what it looks like in the release:

It works great, and the first few in-game progressions are already good. Just making the last few gameplay and visual tweaks.

We have big plans for this in the versions to come!

What else we have left to do...

• Recode a bunch of videos.

  Quick technical diversion... we have ended up recoding the videos many times trying to get the right balance of quality, file size, and performance.
  
  I went down a blind alley with Dark Anu where we recoded them with an AV1 codec. AV1 has the smallest file sizes for the best quality! It was only when we'd done 90% of them that I found that the performance was terrible in-game. So we had to re-do them all with VP9 and rebalance the compression, all very frustrating. Got 56 of them left to do.

• Add some more sound effects
  Every scene is scored and complete sound-wise, but there's a few places where we need extra clicks, and ambient sounds.

• Test it
  Once we've done with the minigame (it's days away), we'll be giving the beta version to the Dark Anu Studio team for QA testing, and after that comes...

• Release it on Steam

  We're aiming for early August.

I'll ask Anu to see if I can give an early release for my paid subs when we go to Steam, look out for it!

And you thought summer was already hot.

Mike