Monthly Update!

Well kids, it's that time again. And this time around I've actually got some pretty exciting news. But before we get into all that, first off I'm letting you know that I'm pausing billing again (meaning that you won't be getting charged for your patronage come March 1st). 

That said, all being well, I will be turning billing back on for April - because I've made some really exciting developments with the new (hopefully improved) version of Girl Games! As I outlined before, I've been working away on getting the basic main paths/connections of the game worked out in Twine and I'm almost done with that now - and the writing is almost all there in first draft too. 

Which means I'm now at a place where I'm ready to connect the dots and fill it all back in in my game engine of choice - be it Twine (which the original version was made in), Ren'py (which the last version was made in) or ... Godot. 

That's right, I might well be switching game engines again. But before you groan and roll your eyes, trust me, if my hunch is right then this is going to bring Girl Games to the next level. I've already been familiarizing myself with the game engine and I even have a working version of the Wardrobe and Paperdoll system up and running! I was hoping to actually share it with you in this very post, but it still needs a little work before it's ready for public consumption - but expect another update and a secret link in the very next post, maybe in a few days from now! 

On top of that, I've made a trial run of a few scenes and navigation around campus and whatnot and yep, I'm confident I can port everything across. So why Godot over Twine or Ren'py? Well, hear me out on this one! 

Twine is basically browser based - it's super easy to write the text part, but once you get into pushing it to do other stuff (like the paperdoll, other layered images, the map system, etc etc) then the cracks start to show and unless I take a full crash course in CSS (which I've found I really don't enjoy) then its a super frustrating process trying to get it to do all the fun things I want. 

Ren'py was a step up in terms of 'slickness' for sure - all those scene transitions and the cleaner UI was definitely a step up (in my book at least!) - but again, it's built for Visual novels, just clicking through text and very simple Paperdoll stuff (which I found was limited to a number of wardrobe items). Plus if you want to try to do more unusual/unique stuff then it starts to grumble and you have to come up with code-heavy workarounds (which basically require you to be a computer major in python). 

Now we get to Godot. It's built as a full on game engine - like Unity and Unreal - and it can totally handle simple text based stuff like Twine and more slick transitions and whatnot like Ren'py. But on top of that? Well it can basically do anything else too. I'm still planning Girl Games to be a very familiar experience if you've played the last two versions, but imagine if the other side stuff was more 'fun'. Take the gloryhole for example. What if that was its own minigame? In Godot that's totally possible! Same for the Girl Games competition itself. It could be a freaking rhythm game if I wanted it to be! Already the paperdoll UI I have working has convinced me that this is for sure the way to go. Now my inventory system is super slick and it means with a few custom functions and lines of code, I can have things like extra shadows/creases on your t-shirt if you're wearing a bra beneath it, or a bulge in the panties if you haven't tucked. Which of course in future NPCs would react to accordingly. The sky's the limit basically! 

Obviously, I've learnt my lessons before and with all this possibility and feature creep, there's the very real chance I could get bogged down in adding all these juicy extras and never finish the main damn story! But as I said above, that's still priority number one and until I have that all finished and working, even if it's just ugly ass text on screen, I'm not going to turn billing back on. 

So there. That's where I am. Exciting right?! 

I hope you all agree! And I'll be back in a few days to share a secret link to the new working wardrobe and paperdoll system so you can play around with it yourselves and see what I'm talking about! 

Until then, take care and thanks so much for your patience! 

Dana x