Dev Diary #11 - Progress Update August+September & What's Next

It's back! Here's the monthly summary of updates and lookout into the near future that hasn't been monthly lately ;) To make up for that, I'm gonna cover the month we missed as well.

First things first:

The first playable finally approaches a releasable state. A closed Beta for all our patrons from 3$ up will start this month if nothing big goes wrong! After the Beta finishes and everything is polished, there will be a first public release. We are already so excited to let you all play the game so far!

Content Updates

- We introduced a new girl that Cucu is now actively working on. Her Name is Baby and she is a half human, half unicorn girl. We showed her background painting as well as a bunch of sketches that display possible character traits along with a little more info about herself.

- I very recently finished Anaela's second XXX scene animations which is an important part of the first playable. A video of the different animation cycles was uploaded for patrons of the according tiers.

- Another pending task has been completed by painting an asian suburb as background for Mayu's introduction within the game. Our patrons could see the according sketch as well as the final outcome.

- Speaking of Mayu, we put out the cumshot version of her third XXX stage and put together a time lapse video for the painting process of her second sticker.

- Nikki received a whole lot of updates. Her second XXX scene was finished and posted both mid-act and as cumshot version. Her first scene also received a cumshot version while the third one was shown as a WIP sketch. The finished artwork will drop any day now. Last but not least her second sticker was finished along with another time lapse on the painting process.

- Thanks to a very good friend, the menu music is now done and partially released to our patrons' enjoyment :) I also created some smaller kind of „remixed“ music loops for the success screen and such

Coding Updates

- I don't even remember the lots and lots of „smaller“ changes, optimizations and bug fixes I did in the last two months but much of it aimed at making the game properly and most of all cleanly restartable in terms of recycling game elements and not spamming the browser memory unnecessarily. I talked about this in the last updated but it is finally done now :)

- Building on this, I implemented the second stage with it's individual level (which is also mostly done), graphics and animations.

- For proper stage endings I adjusted the Game Over screen and added a retry button and introduced a new winning screen that allows to look at this stages XXX animation a little more while being able to control the animations speed in three steps before continuing to the next stage.

- I set up a proper pause screen with a restart button and a general mute/unmute button as well as individual 10-step volume controls for each music, sound effects and voices. the complete sound playback engine was reorganized in order to make this possible but I figured it had to be done at some point anyways

- Changed the data format of the XXX animations and adjusted their implementation which saves another 20-25% of file size per animation. Yay! ;)

What's next

As stated at the beginning, we're moving closer to the beta (hopefully this month) and ultimately a first public release. There are a few things left to do before the beta and a few things more before we can put it out there. These are the next on the list:

- a Combo system that rewards good playing more directly: Collecting multiple hearts in a row will increase a multiplier that will help keeping the pressure bar down and grant more points in later versions as the score system is not planned the first playable. While the only ways to affect the pressure until now were collecting ice-cubes or colliding with mines, the combo-system is meant to make the game feel a little more direct and influenceable.

- We already started designing nice startup screens for the different stages showing the according girl, her name and the number of the upcoming stage with a few nice optical effects to get you ready. Think of it as a variation of fighting games' loading screens

- Some additional graphics and sounds need to be created and/or changed and the last 10% of level design need to be done. Except for occasional tweaking, the beta would be pretty much finished at this point.

- For the public release, a few story sequences need to be coded. Artwork and rough scripts are mostly done. Also, some additional visual and sound effects are planned along with whatever optimizations or changes the patrons' feedback will evoke.

- On the artwork front, Cucu is just now working on Nikki's last bits so that we can soon send the artwork packs out.

- Our new character Baby (see above) will get her first artworks next, so lots of cool stuff coming up =)

As always, many thanks for the ongoing support so far, let's tear that big milestone down together!

Stay tuned!

Zanzo and Cucu