Strange Gift Progress (and a ramble)

I play a lot of board games, especially eurogames. And for a long time I used to think that "bits" -- whether the pieces are wood or plastic or cardboard -- shouldn't matter. But they do... and rather oddly, they effect people's perception of the mechanics of the game, not just its aesthetics, in much the way nice atmosphere are a restaurant can make the food taste better.

So what does that have to do with erotic games? Well, renders and dialogue are the "bits" of erotic games. When I started writing SG, I was looking forward to making a game that had better renders and dialogue than Damsels does, but that led me to making "bits" first, and mechanics largely second. I rebooted because I work better the other way around. There's still a lot of work to do on the mechanics -- the game is more grindy than I want it to be -- but at this point, part of the issue is that better "bits" will make the game feel better, so I'm chugging away at doing more renders. It won't be an overnight graphical wonderland, but my focus so far this week has been on incremental improvement. With 15 character models, it will take a long time for the game to get completely where I want it in this regard.

Another part of this, and interrelated to the question of mechanics, is adding back custom characters (like Chloe and Olivia). Expect more of that coming in... I hope to have Mia back in the game for the next version. The balance there is that I want to maintain the mystery of who is working for the other side, and more custom and fewer random characters narrows down the options -- so I'm looking for a way that I'm happy with to include the possibility that the custom characters may start out in Loki's pay.

However far I get, you should see a release on Monday, with *at least* some mechanics tweaks, a small UI improvement, and two or more new renders for each model.