Update 41

tl;dr - The Ai sex scene and the Rio sex scene are both largely finished, I've added some images to the game, and I discuss how I select music for games.

Today's image:

Iku naked, in Iray, with latest anatomy upgrade. What do you think?

I may have shown variations of this pose/shot before (can't remember), but even if I have I'm more pleased with this version than any of the previous ones.

Ai sex scene largely finished, Rio programming developing also:

Apart from a few small placeholders the Ai sex scene (and romance) is now done. I've edited the audio, implemented all the text and font tags, and put it all into the game. Even the images are mostly done. Therefore that will be almost fully playable in the next alpha!

As of today the Rio sex scene will also be playable in the next alpha. I've programmed the tasks for the scene (although I may need to add a little from what I've got so far) and I've audio and put the text in. The Rio scene is short on images; when I get my new computer I'll make up some more to flesh out the scene and get it pretty much done, so I'm planning on probably not releasing the next alpha until I've got a few more images in there.

That's right, the next alpha will have TWO (count them) TWO new sex scenes.

Images added to game... but otherwise it was Christmas:

As I mentioned last week I recently created a lot of images for the game. This week I went through adding them into the game, where appropriate. That said, I was a little distracted by the holiday this week. I had various family commitments and other stuff to deal with, but despite that I'm pretty happy with the progress I made!

Music for games:

I thought I'd briefly discuss how I select music for games, since there are a few little nuances to the process. I started out by adding music to PAF because when I played test versions I really felt there was something lacking in the experience without it. Once I started using audio for voices and sound effects I felt that the experience needed musical accompaniment in a way that it might not have needed it had I not been using any sound at all.

For a start I try to respect copyright, so I now get music mostly from the Free Music Archive, which is a curated archive of professional music that is available under creative commons licenses. Basically, the music is generally free to use because the artists have opted to make it available that way. It's a pretty good archive because it allows you to search by genre, but there's still quite a bit of work in the process as I have to listen through a lot of material before I find anything that suits the kind of atmosphere I'm trying to create in a particular project. Generally I have a specific tone or selection of tones that I want to create in a game and some tunes might be good but simply unsuitable for the atmosphere.

I've also, obviously, got to actually like the tune and think it's good to hear over and over several times in a game. I give each character a leitmotif theme that will reoccur multiple times as well as ambient music that reoccurs frequently, so therefore the selections need to be enjoyable and not irritating, and I need to have a bunch of different ambient tracks for variety. Oh, and those leitmotif tracks are particularly challenging to get right because they need to be right for all different points within the girl's romantic plot - say, for example, I give Iku a fun, quirky tune because some of her scenes are fun and quirky, but then it turns out some of her other scenes are sad or sentimental. Will the theme then ruin the tone of those scenes by being too happy or silly?

My selections are also limited by the need to use instrumental tracks. Vocals in songs clash with voice acting, making it hard to understand what the actor is saying. That pretty much means I can't use any song with anything but the most minimal of vocals.

Selecting the music for a project has become one of my earliest steps (although I continue to pick up tracks as I go) because I like to have a sense of the tone when I'm writing it. If I find particularly good stuff then it's fun to listen to it while designing scenes or writing them up.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Questions? Please leave them in the comments below!