Update 43

tl;dr - I've been making images, testing the game and solving bugs. The next alpha isn't ready, but it will be once I'm done with this round of testing.

Today's image:

Part of my recent image work (discussed below). You might know this scene if you've played the alpha - Fumi changing a light bulb on day 2 in a slightly unsafe way (notice she's wearing roller skates). I'm not actually 100% happy with this pic, but I thought it was probably good enough to go with it. I thought I'd put it up here in order to solicit opinions - what do you think? Does it work?

ADRIFT bug:

I struggled for a while this week with an ADRIFT game engine bug that was preventing the game from running properly. I managed to solve the problem (more or less - the bug is still there but I know how to work around it). That took some time and trouble that I wasn't expecting to have to spend this week, but whatever, it's fixed now. That's the problem with building a game in an engine that's in beta.

Image work:

My most significant progress lately has been in rendering even more images for the game. I've wanted a lot of the scenes that were already in the alpha but didn't have images to be illustrated. In order to create the feeling and gameplay experience that I've been hoping for in PAL I need it to be a lot more comprehensively illustrated than the previous games in the series, and naturally that takes time and work to get it right. So I guess that means that my ambitions for this game are higher than in past; PAF was quite a tightly put together project in some ways but the images tended to be fairly simple to build, and PAL's are just more complicated and rendered to a much higher quality.

Some examples of bits that needed images are moments like when a maid comes to your room and waits for your night service orders. Clearly those scenes are improved if you at least have an image of the girl looking nervous while you make up your mind. Also, there were some images that I felt would benefit from being re-rendered in Iray, or straight up rebuilt from scratch. The first image of Kenji in the game, for example, was in a room that looked empty and it gave the impression that there was no furniture in the mansion. Also the pose wasn't quite right, so I redid that image with a new pose, a more complex room behind him and did it all in Iray, and now I feel it creates a much better first impression. I actually haven't finished this job - there are some bits I will still need to go back and illustrate - but I've made progress.

Testing:

Before I can release the next alpha I need to run a full test to make sure it all works as intended. In fact I'm pretty certain it won't all work as intended, so I need to find the problems and fix them, then test it over again. Therefore I've been starting a lot of test runs recently, but I keep finding problems so early that I have to stop the test and go and fix what's wrong. That means at time of writing I still haven't actually been able to test the Ai or Rio sex scenes, which are implemented but probably buggy. I could just drop the alpha now and let players find the problems, but it's likely it would be so faulty that it wouldn't be fair on you guys.

Anyway, I'll keep plugging away on it. Hopefully I'll have it done soon. Once my testing is done and I'm confident that the bugs are ironed out I'll be releasing alpha v0.7.0.

Questions? Suggestions? Opinions on anything (including the image above)? Please let me know in the comments section!