Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

Wow, this week has been incredibly productive. With me being on vacation from my regular day job, I've had the opportunity to feel what this project could have been if I had it as a full-time job. Sadly, that is impossible as things stand with the current funding, so I have to work two jobs. 

Anyway, it's now been exactly one week since the release of version 0.41 of Long Live the Princess. In that short time, I have managed to do a lot. Let's go over it all, shall we?

Long Live the Princess

Possibly the most time-consuming part of polishing the game for version 1.00 will be to fully update all the remaining sex animations I haven't gotten to yet. There are not a lot of those left, but some of them are large and unwieldy, requiring a lot of time and effort to update. I took care of one of those this week, which saves me some time when I get to 1.00 next update. The scene I updated was the repeatable Evelyn romance scene in her bed. It now has better lighting, physics, and a higher framerate, but it took a LOT of rendering to get to that point.

After finishing the updated sex scene, I went straight into the new content for 0.42. One of the scenes introduced in 0.41 is getting expanded in this version, and I have added the required images. I still need to code and write that bit, but the images are the most time-consuming part. I also fully posed, animated, and rendered one of the two big sex scenes you will see in 0.42. The one I took care of first is the largest, with the most variations. In other words, I'm way past the halfway point in renders for 0.42, and it's just been a week!

The 0.42 image folder currently counts 344 images to give you an idea of the scale I'm already at.

Supermodel

Once I wrapped up the things mentioned for LLtP, I decided to give Supermodel some sorely needed attention again. As usual, my focus is on getting the card game prototype working, and the rest is icing on top. 

Perhaps most importantly, a brand new version of the Ren'py engine was just released. This version updates Python, the programming language operating in the background of Ren'py, sorely needed after the previous one was outdated by a decade or so. This will make a massive difference in what I can do with Supermodel and how I can do it. I'm not using the new version for LLtP so as not to introduce any instability at this final stage of development, but I am using it for Supermodel.

Also, I finally got the state machine fully working and integrated it with the turn structure. To keep the technical mumbo-jumbo at a minimum, what this means is that I can now actually play the game, albeit in a highly simplified way. I can play cards, destroy opposing cards, end my turn, receive new cards at the start of a new turn, and so on. It feels very satisfying to finally see some of my concepts in action for the first time. I'm already seeing the outline of some of the many balance issues I will likely face as I move forward. Exciting times, for sure.

Right now, I'm building an animation queue to make things look exciting when things happen. When you play that big card combo you've been building up to, I want the game to look as awesome as you feel, and setting up these animation chains is a big part of that.

I plan to continue giving Supermodel some attention in the coming days before turning my attention back to Long Live the Princess again.

Until next time!