Update 46

tl;dr - I have completed and released PAL alpha version 0.7.0! Now I'm moving on to working on one of the threesome scenes.

Today's image:

Little bit of a spoiler here, but I think the context of this scene is cryptic enough that you don't really know what's going on. If you're wondering, yes, Rio is pulling Ai's hair in this shot.

If you've played the alpha you might have some more clues on what's happening here, but ultimately you'll just have to wait until I've got the Ai/Rio threesome scene ready. If you haven't played the alpha yet I'll just tell you that nobody other than the development team actually knows what's going on here just yet...

On a more general point, do you like the image? I like it, but I always want to make sure that it's free of uncanny valley problems and it all looks good to other eyes. BTW, this room is the new set I'm using for hospital images (I lost the last one I had, but  this one is a little more complete anyway).

Alpha v0.7.0 released:

After finishing up my testing on PAL alpha version 0.7.0 I was finally able to release it to $10+ patrons. I had to leave a bug in the game (Fumi's bullseye spell still isn't working) but otherwise it's pretty functional, I think. This long-awaited version had the Ai and Rio sex scenes both implemented, as well as a raft of new and replaced images. I also made a lot of little changes that I can't remember at this point - most notably I fixed up the 'lake day' event.

Sorry this took so long to release; most of the actual work on it was done weeks ago but as I've chronicled over the last few weeks I found myself wanting to make significant changes each time I booted up the game, so it was taking me a long time to actually get to the bits that needed testing. The slightly frustrating part of this is that a lot of the changes are actually quite subtle and you may not notice a whole lot of difference in most cases. Some of it involved simple bug fixes since the ADRIFT engine has been updated to a new version that (while it added new features) brought in some frustrating new bugs.

Working on a threesome scene:

I plan next to be working on the threesome scene for Ai and Rio; that will presumably be finished in the next alpha. The structure of this scene (and one of the other threesome scenes) will be a little different to the main sex scenes; I find when writing sex scenes it is really easy to get burned out writing endless variations on small foreplay activities like 'rub tits', and for that reason I don't have a lot of enthusiasm about writing another lot of those responses for each character for the threesome scenes after already writing the main sex scenes (all the scenes are mostly written already, just to be clear - I'm speaking about the process in a more abstract way). The traditional AIF sex scene format can also be a little bit limiting in some of the sexual scenarios that it allows - it forces a specific structure to how the scene plays out and sometimes I want to have other stuff happening.

Therefore this threesome scene is designed as a series of five binary choices where you can take option A or option B. You'll also get some degree of freedom of action during these scenes, but you won't get a whole lot of depth from the 'traditional' AIF sex scene actions. I think you'll be fine with how this plays out in the game, as it means a change of pace. You will also have already had a one-on-one sex scene with each of the girls involved in the threesome, so I feel that will make the player want to get straight to the action in the threesome scenes. It was only for the third threesome scene that I decided to go with the more traditional structure because I felt that particular scene would work well that way.

All of that came off a little vague. You'll get what I mean when you play it; I hope you like it.

Voice acting:

Sacci has now sent me most of her completed lines; not quite all as of yet, but I do have all the lines for the sex scene. So I said I plan to work on the threesome scene above, but I may wind up focussing more on the Iku sex scene. I don't know yet, it always depends a little on my mood, but I've already done some work on that today.

As far as actual progress is concerned I've been improving the amount of voice acting in the combat section of the game. I actually had forgotten that I have a selection of lines available that I hadn't implemented, beyond the fact that I hadn't had the Iku lines available. Now that I have Iku's battle lines (I got them from Sacci a while ago) I can add voice acting for moments like misses and critical hits. I'll have to do a little experimentation to see how often I want these lines to turn up, but one of my main remaining goals is to make the combat sections more exciting in an audio/visual way. I'm really proud of the way the combat scenes feel in PAF and I want PAL's scenes to live up to that standard.

Questions? Suggestions? Thoughts about the above image or the threesome scene structure? Put them in the comments section below, I love hearing from you!