Progress Report

Hello there!

It's been another productive week with Long Live the Princess. I'm fully taking advantage of the fact that I'm not working on any significant new features right now. As a result, I'm handling many minor things that have cropped up over time instead. After this update, I suspect I won't have the chance to work on these minor features again for some time. 

I have finished the first Belle scene that I mentioned last week. It's looking a lot better now that it's fully animated instead of swapping back and forth between two images.

One thing that people are probably going to get way too excited about, compared to how little it matters, is that I finally added the optional ability checks in the tutorial. Seriously, this has been one of the most requested features in this game, but it makes little impact. The purpose isn't actually the added content, after all (which is mostly just a little bit of extra dialogue and two new renders), but to demonstrate the concept of ability checks to new players. 

I made it possible to obtain a point of charisma from Samarra even if you don't choose to have sex with her. This should make it easier to max out that stat until I add more sources for it, starting in the next update.

Samarra's first training session has been entirely redone, by the way. It looks much better now that it's fully animated and has a slightly new style. I finally decided to just make her ditch the armor (but not the padding) for this scene as it was only getting in the way of the action. This scene has now become, dare I say it, sexy!

You'll no longer see any mentions of gold and silver coins that aren't story-related. I completely removed the mechanic from the game. I had bigger plans for a slightly more advanced economy when I first started working on LLtP, but it turned out not to be necessary as time went by. From now on, the only money you need to worry about in the game is copper. 

Finally, I'm currently finishing up the improved version of Erato's pathfinding training. I've been dreading this one, to be honest. This scene features six different animations that all needed to be redone. All but one of them features multiple camera angles. That's a lot of renders and a lot of posing, but it had to be done. Besides, the results are worth it. 

As mentioned in the last progress report, I intend to continue working on features like this for a little longer. I could theoretically release 0.35 at almost any time. Still, I'm going to hold back to March just so I can cram in a little more polish before we move on to Callie. I can tell you right now that you're basically guaranteed to get 0.35 in March. There are no significant challenges or unknowns in the way. It's just a question of how much polish I want to do and how many old scenes I want to improve. 

For now, I'm diving back into Erato's scene. Even with 428 renders currently in the 0.35 folder, there is no time to rest. Lots of work still remains to be done.

Until next time!