CSkinGames

Spoiler (and a small preview)

Spoilers within! You were warned. (Twice).

So what's the spoiler? Besides the preview: I am never going to spoil anything related to the story, but this is more a side thing, so I am going to. Every chapter moving forward, you'll have an opportunity to go ahead with Lauren, or turn her down.

If you accept her advances, she probably won't be making any more. If you turn them down, then she probably will! What happens, and what the end result of all of this is, I won't get into. The real question is - will she reward you for your restraint? Or will she just be mad she had to work so hard for it? And what will the other characters think? 

So that's the main spoiler. Every chapter from 2 onward, will have a scene with Lauren - but then again, the earlier you accept, the less likely it is you'll be able to get the ones in the future. 

Progress Update! (And some interesting news)

This past week was... interesting.

Unfortunately I got a lot less done than I had planned. Someone (not me) close to me had (or has had, ongoing for a while) some health issues, and I had to play chauffer for a bit. It's not a regular thing, but it did mean I got a bit less done than I would have liked this week. 

That said, I did still manage to finish everything up to the free-roam event, and make some progress into it. I got about halfway through, and should be able to finish the rest over the weekend now that I'm back on my own schedule and not someone else's. (Full disclosure - if something comes up again, I will end up taking time off to take care of that, but I don't foresee it anytime soon either.) 

Looking at what I have done so far, and what I have left, I'd put a (VERY ROUGH) estimate of about 30% done at this point. 

Once I feel like I'm about 50% done, I'll provide a small checklist of what I have left - I'll try to do that again around 75% or so, and one more time when we're close to release. Right now I am very (VERY) tentatively aiming for sometime between mid Nov. -late Dec. but I can't really provide anything concrete any time soon. 

Now for the news:

This past week I did get one major thing done - I signed a deal with a new music provider. I'm pretty excited about this, the quality is leaps and bounds above what I've been able to use so far. I've already picked out a number of tracks I think are great for Ch2, and I'm sure I'll come up with more by the time we're done. Here's an example - here's one song I've picked out for CH2 so far  - https://open.spotify.com/track/5lPm6CFdzmaOCc2QErmIxB  

That's all for now - I'm going to try not to completely burn myself out over the next couple of weeks trying to make up for falling a little behind this past week. I'll have another update next week as usual - until then, have a great week!

Progress Update

Well, got another couple hundred done this week, plus a few animations. After this weekend I'll finally be started on that major free roam event. I did want to get started on it a little earlier, but one of the scenes ended up being quite a bit larger than I had anticipated.

I'm going to take a few days off from working on renders though before that - I have quite a decent sized queue built at the moment, so I'll work on some other stuff that needs to get done first, while I let the queue get lower to a more manageable number. (In other words, less than triple digits!)

In the mean time, I'll be working on some coding tasks, as well as something... potentially major. Over the past week I've been in possible discussions with a new music provider. It is NOT by any means cheap, so I want to take some time and really dig into what they have available before I commit to it. What I've heard so far though, is very good. If I decide to go through with it, you'll see the overall quality of the music go WAY up in future chapters. It definitely requires at least a couple of days work though just combing through everything they have before I commit - since like I said, it is on the expensive side of things. 

While I was mostly happy with the music in Chapter 1, only a few tracks really stood out to me as *GOOD*. The rest, were mostly just sort of there. Having the opportunity to put some really good music to the game is something I'm going to have to strongly consider. 

Music aside like I said, there's a handful of coding tasks that need to get done, so I'll do those as well, and then some time next week get back to rendering, and working on the free roam. After that, I have quite a bit of writing to do. Since the free roam itself is going to build up quite a decent render queue itself, I'll probably work on writing while the majority of that renders out.

That's all for now - I'll have another update next week, as always - plus I'll let you guys know my final decision on the music once I've made up my mind on that front. Until then, have a great week!

Progress Update

Not too much of an update today. Been working on renders all week. Got a couple hundred done, now I'm starting on the first major scene of CH2. This particular scene will take a while, as it's the first major branching scene of the game. (Quite a lot of decisions you've made thus far, plus a few you'll make here, determine how it plays out). 

Once that's done, I'll begin work on the first major freeroam event of the chapter, which I expect will take the majority of the week. It's not too big - roughly the same size as the frat house one in CH1, but a little bigger, with a little bit more content. Nothing too extravagant though. As last time, I'll be working on code and renders at the same time to make sure everything works properly and as expected.

After that, I have a few more scenes to work through, then it'll be back to writing for a little bit. All combined I expect everything I currently have planned out to be somewhere in the area of 6-700 total renders, plus a handful of animations. 

That's pretty much my next three weeks or so planned out already. Once I get back to writing, I'll work on "what's next" after that! 

That's pretty much it for now. I'll have mostly small updates the next couple of weeks. By the end of the month I hope to have some numbers to share (rough estimates on render count, playtime, stuff like that), but for now it's back to work! So until next time - have a great week!

Getting Ready.

That's all. Just Shana getting ready.

Progress Update

Got a ton of writing done this week. I've finally sketched out at least the entirety of CH2, and a good portion of CH3. Speaking of... While working on the scavenger hunt, I realized it was simply too big to fit into one chapter, so I decided it'll span most of Ch2 and 3. If I tried to fit it all into one chapter, it'd either be absolutely MASSIVE and take forever to get out, or I'd have to cut other things I want, which isn't an option. Because it'll span two full chapters, I've been doing a lot of the prep work for CH3 along-side Ch2. On the plus side, this means once I start work on CH3, a good part of the pre-game prep work will already be finished.

I also started on the renders for CH2. Besides that the dialogue for about the first 30% or so of the chapter is finished. Between that and all my setup and prep lately, I'm pretty good to go full into the render process for a while. At this point I've not completed too many - just about two dozen, but I have knocked out a number of animations for the chapter already. By very very rough estimate CH2 will contain anywhere between 15-40 animations total (No way to know for sure until later. It'll be a mix of completely sfw animations, and not.)

How big will Ch2 be? I'm not entirely sure yet. My initial estimation was approx the same size as Ch1, but I don't think that's likely as I've been working on writing. As mentioned I've finished dialogue for about the first 1/3rd of the chapter - and it comes out to about half the word count of CH1. So while it looks like it'll be decently bigger, a LOT of CH1 development was setting up all the UIs and systems that are now already in place, so I won't have to re-do that work a second time. Hopefully that means the development time isn't much longer.

Finally, Ch1 is officially live for all $5 patrons starting today. 

Link here, just in case: https://www.patreon.com/posts/87807292 

I've already uploaded one small bugfix, along with a very minor change to a menu system (which will be completely redesigned in future updates, but for now I just went with the quick hack fix so I can focus on Ch2).

That's all for now, more updates next week. Until then, have a great week!

Minor Bugfix

Just a note: Links to download were updated with a few bugfixes. A few typos were cleaned up as well as:

Chuck music window is now draggable, and has a scrollbar. (Previously you could move through it with the scrollwheel on mouse, but this was non-intuitive, so I added a scrollbar and drag options until I redo the interface a bit in a future update).

Credit shop now works again! (A minor typo in the code broke it, it's now working as intended)

Jasmine text message objective will be marked as complete when finished. (Previously it only was marked as complete in certain scenarios - others would leave it as incomplete).

Main download links were updated. 

Minor Ch2 Spoiler!

I mentioned a scavenger hunt right? Well here's the list of items you need for it!

Well.... the first word of each item on the hunt anyway.

Progress Update

Well, work is underway on Chapter 2. I spent a lot of this week just planning. I have the overall layout fleshed out, and writing done for the first scene. I'm currently finishing up making sure I have everything mapped out, then I'll begin the storyboarding process. In the future I'd like to have most of the chapter finished before I really get to work on it, but for now I'm going to go bits at a time - so I'll work on getting a handful of scenes down, then work on all the renders/etc for those, then do another block - and so on. I don't want to have it all done from the start, because the entire thing is a little bit of a learning process as I get used to it, and since I know it'll be a little slower than normal at first, I didn't want to delay getting into the renders too much.

I have a lot of things planned for this chapter, some of which I'm kinda excited about. One major one is going to be a sort of scavenger hunt. Throughout the next couple chapters, the characters will be involved in a major scavenger hunt, (of course with a prize for the winner). Most of the school will be competing - though some tasks will require cooperation! I won't be giving too much else away on this - some characters will barely be passive participating, while others are determined to win at all costs. Winning (or losing!) may have consequences, which is something to keep in mind as you tick off tasks (or decide not to!). 

Some of the tasks will be finding certain things, or solving certain problems. Others may be performing certain tasks (and collecting evidence, of course). Some, everyone will be able to complete, but others might only be doable once. Each task has a point value attached to it, and the person with the highest score at the end wins! That's all on that, all the details and rules will be a part of Ch2, as well as the list of tasks you need to accomplish. In regards to that, Ch2 will see a very slight change to the way the phone works. In Ch1, the phone was *only* available during free roams. In Ch2 (and 3.. we'll see beyond that) the phone will be available at all times, but some functionality will be disabled outside of free roams. The main reason for this is the phone will have a new app with all the scavenger hunt items listed, and noted if you've completed them or not. While you'll have an opportunity to complete some during free roam events, others may present themselves during the course of the normal storyline, so I decided it would be helpful to have a reference sheet always available. 

A lot of Chapter 2 will also focus on getting to know some of the characters that may have been briefly introduced in Ch1 but you didn't really get to know or have any time with. Of course that doesn't mean the other characters take a backseat - it just means there will be a lot to do!

That's all for now. I'll continue working on finishing up the bulk of the writing and planning this weekend, and hopefully get started on the renders midway through next week. I'll have - as always - more info to share next week, along with the official release at the $5 tier. So until then, have a great week!

(Not quite A) Progress Update

Edit: The (new) visual style is now uploaded, and has replaced the old download links. Anyone who previously downloaded the old version may notice this one is significantly smaller (almost half the size!) That's due to a different style image compression I tried. I personally couldn't notice any difference in the quality of the larger (KB-wise) images vs the smaller ones, so I'm going to stick with the better compression (AKA smaller file size) unless someone can point out that they notice a significant decline - in which case I may switch back.

I experimented with a slightly different visual style for this release. Today, after playing around quite a bit - I've decided I'm not entirely happy with it. So I spent most of the day messing around with stuff, and arrived with something I much prefer. I'll be re-uploading the game sometime late tomorrow with the "new" graphics (it's the same really, but it does look a little bit different), as well as a couple very very minor bugfixes that I assume no one will notice. It'll likely be late tomorrow because I stopped working on it about halfway through because I have been up for 20+ hrs, so I'll have to finish it tomorrow.

Well, with Ch1 finished, what's next? Ch2 obviously! It'll be a little bit before I get started on the renders for it. I decided I want to do things a little differently going forward, so I'm going to get all the setup for that done so I have a good flow once I start on Ch3 and beyond.

So far my flow has been this: Write the entire chapter skeleton. (Every event, anything major, 90% of the minor stuff, use my "global" storyline as reference). Then write the actual dialogue for at least a month or so worth of rendering - then get into that. At that point I splice in writing and rendering as I go until I'm done - mixing in coding whenever I need to.

Moving forward I want to actually storyboard everything out. Normally when I'm rendering, I'm building the renders to the dialogue, and coming up with everything else sort of on the fly. (Anything going on in the background that isn't story important, any "stuff" around, the camera angle, all that stuff). Instead, I want *all* of that pre-determined. This frontloads the work slightly, and it'll obviously still be subject to change, but it will accomplish two things. #1 - It'll make the actual process of building the renders easier, as I don't have to spend as much time "coming up" with stuff as I go. Second, it'll help a ton with consistency. I've run into issues a few times where I put something in  a scene, but then I had to go edit other stuff to make sure it was there as well and it becomes a nightmare quickly. By having everything laid out from the start, I'll be able to hopefully work faster, and maintain a visual consistency that I'm happy with.

So what's been done so far? So far I've just worked a bit on the overall outline of Ch2. Over the weekend I'll be making sure to flesh out every event (major and minor), and throughout all of the week I'll work on dialogue for at least the beginning stuff, plus storyboarding everything out. By the week after I should be able to start rendering the first few scenes, and I'll go from there. This is going to be a learning process, so it might slow me down the first few weeks, but once I get the hang of it it'll overall be much better (and allow me to get stuff done quicker!).

So that's all for now. I'll give a quick update next week (though it won't be much since it's all writing for the next week or so!), so until then, have a great week!

No Such Luck Chapter 1 is now Available!

It's been a long time coming, but today marks the release of Chapter 1 of No Such Luck.

Chapter 1 is available to all $10 patrons starting today. On August 31st, it will become available for all $5 patrons.

Direct Link to downloads Here!

What is No Such Luck?

As a young man, he left home immediately after high school, and has spent the last two years alone, in seclusion recovering (From what? You'll find out in the Prologue!), and is finally ready to re-enter the world, ready to join his friends in college. Will it be drugs, sex and rock'n'roll? Or did he never truly get over what happened?

Chapter 1 is actually Chapter 1, and the prologue together. Over 1600 total renders, 17,000+ words of dialogue, and over 40 unique music tracks, The first release contains over a full hour of playable content.

No Such Luck includes multiple Free-Roam events. Easy navigation is made possible either by on-screen arrows, or an easy to use navigation menu at the bottom of the screen, pictured here!

Also includes a phone with playable minigames, text messaging, and more. All minigames are entirely optional, and can be disabled if you prefer. No content is locked behind minigames, so if you hate them? Turn them off!

Also included is an opacity slider for the text box. Want it to be a nice dark background? Or completely gone? Up to you!

Throughout the game you will be presented with a number of choices - many related to how you adapt and deal with the events of the Prologue. These interactions will shape your character as you progress, and may affect how others view you.

With a cast of 40+ characters, There's a little something for everyone! Humor? Sure! Intrigue? Mystery? Romance? Some good old fashioned sex? We got you covered. Wanna see some guy get kicked in the sack? Well have I got news for you!

And now I'll leave you with the obligatory carefully curated screenshots that are safe for public posting. Enjoy No Such Luck!

No Such Luck - Ch1 Direct Link

Direct mega links for No Such Luck - Chapter 1. Title Link goes to PC version. Both PC and Mac below.

PC Here 

Mac Here 

Progress Update

Not too much to share! Release date is set for next week. At this point beta testers have rooted out most of the bugs, typos, and all that jazz. 

Right now my checklist is surprisingly small. I have the gallery to add which I can do in less than a day, Finish up the biographies (I've been putting that one off since it's so quick, I wanted to get the harder tasks done first, so I'll tackle that this weekend), add a credits page, and one more thing I decided to add....

So, I mentioned a very long time ago something about the idea of "hidden objects" in scenes - particularly in free roams. At first it was something I wasn't really keen on doing, but I decided to...sort of. (That's what I'll be working on next, finishing that up). So here's the details:

I thought a lot about minigames. There's a few already, but not many and they're not too extravagant - but I'll definitely be adding more over time. That said, I want minigames to be something COMPLETELY optional for people who enjoy distractions, grinds, and stuff like that. I do not want people to feel like they're "missing out". Currently all "extras" (renders, wallpapers, anything else I add in the future) is locked behind minigames. Now you could say these things don't matter, they're just "extras" and you'd be right! However I know there are certain types of people who would play them despite hating them, JUST to unlock the "extras". So I decided to compromise. With minigames disabled, hidden objects will appear in certain scenes - finding them will unlock those extras. I will note - I do not plan on making it easy by any means to find them all, but after a lot of back and forth I decided to add this as a way to unlock all of those things without ever touching a minigame. This way, if you're the completionist type who wants to "100%" a game - you'll have a choice which path to take to do that. And honestly, it only takes a few hours to add the ~30 or so I'll be adding in this chapter, so it's not a huge deal to add it. So if you're the type who doesn't care about that stuff, you can just disable minigames, play through the game and ignore the objects, and be fine. If you're the type who wants to collect everything, then you can either do it via  minigames, or you can disable them and focus on the item hunt within the scenes. (For now free-roams only. We'll see if I decide to add them to normal scenes later, but not at the moment.)

So that's my list at the moment. All combined it'll only take a few days - I should be done with everything this weekend, which gives me a few more days to go over everything, mull on it, fix any more bugs that pop up, and see if there's anything else I want to add/change/edit/polish/whatever between now and release. I like having a few days to just think on it and not really have much that *needs* to be done, so I can be sure I'm happy with it before shipping it out. 

So that's all for now. I'll see you all next week when the release is out. Until then, have a great week!

No Such Luck - Release Date - Aug. 17th!

All the nitty-gritty info will be available on the date.

For now the release date is set. Aug 17th the first chapter will go live for all $10 patrons and above. 

Aug 31st it will go live for the $5 tier. All the relevant info will be posted on the 17th. I'll have one more small patron update this week, then next week, release! See you all then.

Progress Update

All story renders are now finished. I also fixed up some code, re-did a few pieces so they worked better, worked a little bit on music, fonts, and colors, and got most of the extras done as well - only a couple more to go there, that I'll do throughout the next week or so.

So what's left? Here's my basic checklist at the moment:

Music/Sound FX - I have some, but I need to finish it all up.

Full playthrough of the game - This is to check for any sections I want to expand/add anything to. I already know of two sections I want to add a bit to, and I want to play through everything and see if there's any more. Ultimately this won't add much - maybe 20 or so renders total at most, and a few dozen lines of code, but it'll help flesh out a few sections/add a couple things I want.

Build all Tutorials - there's quite a few things that will need them, and that's my next major project to tackle, is building them all. I expect this to 2nd most amount of time of everything remaining.

Image fixes - while doing playthroughs, check if there's anything I feel like I need to quickly redo/fix. I already know of a couple, so I'll have to try to check everything as I go.

Finish up the Bios section - this is the only bit of writing remaining, it's currently about 50% done, I just need to finish up the rest.

Code for gallery/music - last thing to be done, once everything else is finished, and all the music is set up.

Clean up a number of in-game interfaces - many currently have placeholder images/buttons, (some don't even work at all right now!) , so those all need to be cleaned up. This will take up the most amount of time, likely at least 3-4 days to get it all done.

Go through testing notes. I already ran one (very small) alpha test, and next week I'll have a copy out for beta testers - I already have a few notes of things I need to check, so I'll have to go through all those, plus any beta testing notes, and clean up anything from there.

Actually put together the beta build - this should be some time next week, once I've finished the tutorials and a few other small things.

Set it up so minigames can be disabled - currently they can't be. It'll be possible to do so on release, but I haven't added that functionality yet since I wanted to make sure and thoroughly test them to make sure nothing breaks. Next week I'll likely see about adding functionality to disable them entirely. 

That's about it. My actual checklist I have, is a bit more detailed (like the specifics of what I want to clean up/change/edit/etc on all the interfaces, for example), but that's about the sum of whats left. All combined, I expect it to be about another 2-3 weeks of work before the entire release is ready to go. That means barring catastrophe, it should be ready this month. I'll have a final count once I've finished my playthroughs and added anything I feel is missing - but it'll be around ~1650 or so renders total. (Currently at 1633, not counting wallpapers/etc, I expect to add another 20 or so total). 

That's all for now - I'll have one last progress update next week, and likely a release date set (Like I said, I expect 2-3 weeks, but I won't set an actual date until I get a few more of the larger tasks completed), then the next time you hear from me should be the actual release info! So until next time - Have a great week!

Progress Update

Getting closer. As of now I have just about 200 more renders to go. The writing is 99% done - all that's left is some small stuff like finishing up the bios. After that, it's just the rest of the coding, music, and polish.

I should have the last of the renders finished by the end of next week - though I'll probably take a day or two to go through everything and redo a few things I'm not happy with, plus finishing up the last few wallpapers and bonus renders I still want to do,  so I should be completely done with rendering the beginning of the week after.

I'm not going to announce a release date just yet (soon though) just because I'm not entirely sure how long a few of the things I have left will take. Some of them could take as little as a couple hours, or as much as a week. I won't know for sure until I start working on them - and for now I've been entirely focused on things where I know exactly how long it'll take.

Either way, we're pretty close to being done at this point. Some time in the next few weeks I'll be looking for a small number of beta testers (Definitely not this week or next week, but soon after that), so if interested send me a message.

I also created a new banner - check the top of the patreon page for it! This will be the official banner going forward (Until I inevitably decide to change it sometime in the future). 

Next week I'll be just about done with the renders, so I'll share with you my checklist of everything I have remaining. For now though, there's still quite a bit to do, so I'm gonna go back to getting it done! Until next time - have a great week!

Molly Wallpaper

Working on a ton of stuff, but here's one of the wallpapers I made for the phone. A note about the wallpapers: A cropped version of them will be available as a background image for the phone - and an uncropped version will also be available in the gallery. 

Progress Update

Slowly but surely getting there! This week I handled one of the larger scenes remaining, made some progress on special renders and wallpapers, and started work on the final free-roam event of the chapter (smaller than the previous one, but will still take me a couple days to get through). Currently I'm working on finishing up the free roam.

At this point, it's the rest of the coding/cleanup work (cleaning up interfaces, fixing a few small issues, taking care of typos/etc, all that good stuff), the rest of the writing which at this point is down to a day or two of work at most, and somewhere between 4-500 renders left. Oh, and music. That's getting higher and higher on the todo list as well.

I was set back by about half a day since I had to go back and fix a number of issues with some of the stuff I had already completed, but I'd rather it be fixed now than attempt to push it to later and possibly forget about it. 

I'm starting to build up a decent queue again, so the plan is to finish this free roam I'm working on now, and then take some time off from building renders to let them finish, and try to tackle as much of the music and remaining writing I can get done in that time. Whatever I don't finish, I'll just handle in a week or so when I've built up a sizeable queue again.

Not much left to report, while I have a list of things I'd love to talk about, I think instead I'll spend my time focusing on getting as much done as I can for now. The closer I get to being finished, the more motivated I am to work and get it all done! I'll probably preview a wallpaper or two this week, but aside from that I'm going to really get into "get it done!" mode soon. I'll have another update next week, where I'll be even more motivated to finish up, so until then, have a great week!

Lauren

Finished a pretty large scene today (and packaged the first pre-alpha build for testing!), and started working on some of the special renders. Here's one of them! (You'll have to wait for the game to be out for the rest though)

Progress Update

Well. The free roam is finally finished - it took a bit longer than I had expected. Part of that was taking some time off renders to work on other tasks (primarily coding and writing), and some of it was that as I progressed through I kept adding to it. 

I've now passed 1k total renders, so that's a milestone for it all. I went over everything that's currently remaining yesterday. I'm currently finishing up one post-free roam scene. After that here's what remains: 20 more scenes total. 1 of those is a smaller free-roam, a couple are very tiny (maybe 5-10 renders total), and a couple are fairly large. Of those 20, about 7 more need to be fully written, the rest are done. 

Aside from the renders and the remaining writing, I need to handle music - which may be a bit more troublesome than I originally anticipated but I'll work on it slowly as everything else progresses. Coding needs to be finished - it's somewhere around 80% done in total. Just the music and gallery systems still need to be done, but those will be last. A lot of the in-game interfaces need to be cleaned up - many of them are bare bones, or using placeholder images/buttons that look terrible - they were just there to test the code.

In addition there's the wallpapers and special renders (1-4 days total for all of it, closer to the low end, so at least that'll be quick when I do work on it). I need to finish writing all the in-game bios, but that's only a few hours as well. Finally I need to design tutorials for everything, finish the main menu, and a few little bits of un-important housekeeping. 

All combined it's somewhere around another month of work at minimum, possibly as much as two, depending on how complex a few of the scenes I have left actually become. I anticipate somewhere in the middle of that timeline, so as I estimated earlier, it's looking like either a late august or early september release.

Now for the last bit - Next week, I'll be looking for ONE alpha tester. I'd like someone to be able to run through the game in it's current state. A few notes about this: 

#1 - my primary concern is bugs, graphical errors, and grammatical/spelling mistakes.

#2 - the game is most definitely in an un-finished state. What does this mean? No music (despite there being some in-game dialogue related to music, it's not actually added yet). Most of the interfaces aren't yet cleaned up. The story for the first release is not completed. I haven't actually added a main font yet. (Currently there is only one font set up, for the menu items and things like that. Stuff like dialogue will use a different one, but for the moment it's all using one single font). This makes some text look a bit off. 

Some buttons don't work yet (in particular things related to gallery/music aren't set up). Tutorials don't currently exists, and minigames can't currently be disabled. (That option will be added prior to release, but I haven't done so yet). 

#3 - A handful of the renders need to be touched up, or in a couple cases re-done. I usually mark everything that needs to be redone/fixed, and tackle them in one large batch after all the renders are finished. 

All in all it's in a pretty rough state currently, BUT the majority of the important code (Aka - the stuff I expect to break) is done, and given my progress and where we're currently at, it's a good time to test. 

If you're interested in testing a very rough, unfinished, early build send me a message. The pre-alpha (that's what I'm calling it) build will be ready some time next week. 

That's all for now. The important bit for me, is I'm definitely well past halfway at this point, and all of the more difficult/complex stuff is behind me. With the exception of two scenes left that I have planned, the majority will be relatively easy compared to the work I've done in the past week or so, and should fly by in comparison. So I'll get back to it now, and as always - have a great week!

Molly is uncomfortable

It's probably something Alice said.

Progress Update

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about "building environments" - something I've touched on a few times now.

What does that even entail? Well, sometimes It's relatively easy and takes a whole 5 minutes. Sometimes.....

The majority of environments (outdoor, buildings, whatever) are based on assets - basically something that someone sculpted, modeled, and put up in a store. The problem is, a lot of these often work good as a base, but they're not right for what you actually want. Other times the general modeling/geometry is good, but the actual look...... so, here's two I've done for this release. I'll show the before and after.

First, the main room for the free roam I'm currently working on (Note: I took these shots before I started working on it, and I'm glad I did. I noticed a number of things I wanted to fix/add/address, and those were done before I began building the actual renders. They're not fixed in these shots, but that's not very important.)

Those 3 are the inside of the "main" room. The entire environment is much larger - note the doors, those lead to hallways and additional rooms which aren't part of these images. The entire building I actually sketched out the entire design and layout before I began which made this entire process a lot easier.

Now the before shots:

I will note - I actually like the look of the original quite a bit - but it just doesn't work for what I was doing. But you can see the differences - the fireplace is gone, solid walls replace the glass doors, a "DJ table" was set up, the walls were totally redesigned, doors added where they needed to be, a lot of the furniture is gone and/or replaced, the smallest change was to the upper balcony, while the lower floor got quite a bit of work. It's also sort of hard to tell in those shots, but the overall floor space was increased quite a bit as well. After that I did all the aforementioned work building all the hallways and additional rooms.

If we ignore all the extra rooms, this entire build only took about half a day. Most of that was just redesigning all of the walls, adding the doors, and I ran into a bit of trouble increasing the floor space. But overall while you can see the similarities, you also notice the differences. But overall this specific build didn't take too long. On the other hand...

The main campus. So first, the before shots.

Well, the actual buildings are ok.... but the rest - wow. Well, let's check the after then.

(bonus night shot:)

Ok, now that's quite a bit different. The main buildings didn't receive too much work - just changed the floors and the inside walls, and added some lights. The rest though.

I removed basically everything but the buildings and benches to start. I added my own ground, complete with grass that.... actually looks like grass, trees, sidewalks, lamp posts, trash cans, a statue, and the entire parking lot. The parking lot was the most custom of it all - I had to actually paint and model the entire thing myself since I couldn't find anything acceptable to use as a base. This entire build took a few days to put together - getting the ground (grass/trees/sidewalk) correct took the most amount of time. Parking lot next, then the rest was a bit quicker. I also added some details that you can't see in these images (In fact, so far they don't even show up in any renders, so I'm not sure why I added it!) like a recycling symbol on the trash cans, a "Welcome Back!" banner in the front lobby, There's also a number of floodlights attached to the buildings I added - which so far I haven't used but if I ever do anything on those areas of the building, I'll be glad they're there.

So, that's the basics of it. When I say "building environments" it really does mean very different things. Sometimes it's simply a matter of loading something up and making a few cosmetic changes. Other times it's a LOT more work and effort to get it looking the way I actually want to - and sometimes just nothing exists I can use as a base, so I have to build the entire thing myself.

So what about actual Progress? Well, I'm currently finishing up the major free roam for the chapter. I've finished everything else leading up to it, and we're closing in on 800 total renders so far. Once I finish this free roam (likely this weekend. The entire thing is about 400 on it's own. about 1/3rd are done, but the hard work was finished yesterday so I should breeze through the rest.) I'll take a day or two dedicated just to writing - as of the free roam I'm almost fully caught up to everything properly written, so I'll take a day or two to finish up the majority of what's left. After that I'll have a much better idea of how much longer to complete.

That's all for this week. I'll leave you with one more shot - this is a (not quite finished) actual render using that campus that I had built:

Oh hey, you *can* see the banner! Sort of. Well that's all for now. I'll have a lot more progress and hopefully a very rough eta next week, so until then - have a great week!

MC meets Molly for the first time.

Progress Update

Well, the Prologue is done! (Ok technically there's a little bit of coding left, but that's it). Work on Ch1 is underway - so far I'm around a hundred or so renders into it. Going by my current progress, I want to be started on the first major free-roam of Ch1 by the end of next week. It's fairly large so it'll take me most of the week to complete. 

I also made the first part of the main menu, so that's finally done. I'll save showing any of it until I finish a few more parts and it's closer to complete, but I'm happy with how it's coming out. I also finished building all of the environments for Ch1 except for one - I'll put that one until later, since it's only going to be used for the very last scene in Ch1 (and again in Ch2). It's also small compared to everything else, so it won't take very long. But all the rest are completed. 

I still have a bit more writing to finish up as well - but that will progress as the renders do. 

So what's left in total? Finish all renders for Ch1. No estimate until the writing is finished, but best guess? 1500 more or so. (for reference - just under 600 are done now, plus some animations. Now that all the environments are built and the difficult coding is done, I'll be moving much more quickly. My personal goal is at least 200 a week minimum, shooting for 3-400. For example I've done almost 100 in the last 2 days alone). Finish writing for Ch1 - 22 scenes in total. (It seems like a lot... and it actually is, but realistically it won't take more than a couple of days to handle all of it). 

Finish coding (The main backend system for character traits/etc still needs to be done, this is the only "big" coding project left), create tutorials, Create the gallery and music player systems, (Trivial - I can use the code from Alive as a basis, saving me a lot of time having to build something - then I just adapt it as necessary). 

Music - I currently have the main theme track, and not much else. At some point next month I want to take a day or two and sit down and really tackle music. While honestly I was fairly happy with how the music in Alive turned out, I want the tracks here to be better (both in quality, and in how they fit with the scenes). I was already fairly picky but I'm going to be a lot more moving forward.

Wallpapers and "special" renders. Only a few days for all of those, so no big deal again. 

Clean up a few interfaces - pretty much all of the "real" coding aside from character backend, music, and gallery are done, but the interfaces need some TLC. Right now many of them are just "placeholder" so I had something to use to make it functional, but I need to clean quite a few up. 

Finish the Main menu - the majority is done, it needs one more small element, plus a dozen or so renders for the background. 

Thats... That's about it. I have a list of every single task that needs to be completed, and it's getting smaller by the day. Right now I'm sticking to my previous estimate - I'm expecting to be done by September, but hoping to be finished in August. 

Finally, there's a few days left for all $10 patrons on the Special render poll - be sure to vote! Right now it's a tie, and while I do have plans for tiebreakers, I'd like to see a clear winner! 

That's all for now - I'll have a couple screenshots of some of what I've been working on during the week. For now I'm going to get back to work, since there's a lot to get done! So until next time, have a great week!

Just a little WIP

No progress update, just a couple screenshots of what I've been working on.

On the coding side: (A few names intentionally blacked out, and a few intentionally omitted from the list!) (A note about the bios section - it won't be full immediately, it only populates with people as you meet them, and the bios will be progressively updated as you progress through the game). 

And on the not-coding side:

Progress Update

Well, the prologue is entirely done. (Except for the part where it's not). I was going to be full swing into CH1 right now, but instead between my own semi-desire to get it done, plus the majority of people telling me I should - I'm going to end up including that scene mentioned in the earlier poll. I'm working on it right now, with any luck it'll be done by tomorrow and then I'll be onto CH1 for the weekend. 

The plus side, when I say the prologue is done I do mean done. Coding, writing, renders, everything except a handful of animations I'm currently working on and that'll be done soon. 

By the way, for all $10 patrons there's a poll currently up, it'll last for another week and a half - feel free to vote on it, and decide who gets the focus in the first chapter! (well, not story-wise but hey. We can't have everything.)

I wanted to take a short little bit and talk about some of the characters. One thing I plan on including in the game is a character bio section - this will include everything you've learned so far in the game, as well as things you "should" know but might not have been explicitly stated. I'll give you an example. (Very minor spoilerish - but not really). A few times through the prologue the MC and his dad mention the MC's mom having a "good" day - and how sometimes it's hard with her. This isn't really ever explicitly stated what this means, though it'll come up much later, and it'll be in the character bio from the beginning. This is because it's stuff the character knows - but it just doesn't make sense to randomly add it in dialogue simply for the sake of explaining it, so it'll be there. Not too often, but sometimes the bios will contain info that the MC should know, but as a player you may or may not. That'll be rare though.

So why the bios? Honestly, because there's a LOT of characters. As of current count there's 46, and that number is likely to grow a bit. Keeping track of it all can be a bit much, so I decided to include a bio section so that you have an easy reference if you ever find yourself saying "Hey wait, who is that?" - all the info you've learned so far in the game (plus the very rare aformentioned instances where it's information that should be shared somehow) will be there. This also means it'll update as you learn more about the characters.

I have all the character bios written, but not the in-game versions. That is, the bios I have written include everything, which does include stuff that won't make it into the first release. So ultimately I'll have to write the in-game bios as I go along. I'm going to be sharing some of those here as they're written - but only for the prologue characters. (The MC, his parents, Henry, Marie, Mia, Jess, Clara, Dirk, Mr. Miller, and Pixie specifically). The rest of the characters won't show up until CH1, so I'll hold off on those until the game is actually released. 

So the plan currently is as follows: Finish that final prologue scene today and tomorrow. Get started on Ch1 over the weekend. Right now I'm sort of hoping for a summer release, although I have a sort of worst case scenario (Not really worst case, it just means I ended up adding more than I anticipated) for September. The important bit is I don't rush anything just to "get it out", and I make sure I strive for a level of quality I'm happy with. 

So there you have it. A poll for $10 patrons currently up, CH1 will begin this weekend, that scene mentioned earlier this week is almost finished, and everything is moving along swiftly! I'll probably have the first of the prologue bios written by next week so I'll have that then - but until then, have a great week!

Special Render Poll

I did mention this was coming along on Monday!

So, regarding all of this in-game, here's how it'll work. All of these renders will be tied to minigames (The majority of minigames - their sole purpose will be stuff like this. So if you're not interested in any of them, feel free to turn minigames off entirely!)

For the first release the current plan is to have 7 wallpapers (backgrounds for the phone), and ~20 or so renders available. The wallpapers I already know what they'll be. For the renders, I have about half of them I know what I want to do when I eventually get a chance, but the rest I haven't really figured out yet, so I decided to put it up to a limited vote! 

Of the 20, the vote will cover about 7 of them. (9 already decided, leaving me with 4 more to play as I progress). For reference, I'll include rough promo images of all the characters here:

Alice:

Clara:

Jasmine:

Molly:

Shana:

Bonus: Anna and Lauren (in order)

So you get to decide which character is the focus of the upcoming render series... or none of them!

A (second) more informal poll

While I'm polling people, I have a more general something I'd like to throw to the crowd. Note - this post and poll involves spoilers from the prologue (which were already given away in another post!) - that said, if you want to avoid it entirely, probably stop reading now.

So I've been going back and forth on this, and wanted to get some community feedback. In the prologue the MC proposes, and she accepts. Obviously we all know what will happen that night. This is my conundrum. I'll note by stating 3 things: #1, they're both 18 (and stated as such). #2 - the entire prologue is essentially a flashback, as the entire game happens 2 years later. #3-it's the same night they graduate high school.

Now in my original script I included the scene - I even wrote it. It makes total sense, it's EXACTLY what would happen. I may have made the mistake in Alive of including very early gratuitous scenes just for the sake of including them, but that's not the case here - it perfectly fits with the story, to the point where it'd be weird if it DIDN'T happen. HOWEVER..... I then started thinking about Steam. Steam has been known to outright ban games that include any sort of scenes like this involving high school students (They've graduated, but they're technically in high school that same day - at least their last day of it), and this scene would definitely be towing the line as far as Steam goes. While none of the game breaks any of their rules (But this one scene could be considered borderline, depending on how they're feeling on that particular day) the closer I got, the more worried about it I got. Eventually once I got to that point in the renders, I simply skipped it entirely and went past it.

At first I was going to do the entire scene, but fade to black before you see anything - but as I got to that point, it seemed pointless to do that, since at that point it's just implying what happens anyway so the entire scene got scrapped (referenced by characters, but never actually shown). Now that I've moved past it, a part of me still wants to do it though, mostly because it just feels weird not having it. 

This isn't any sort of formal or binding poll, I just wanted to get some thoughts from others what they think in this situation. 

Progress Update

Pretty happy with my progress overall this week. Managed to get everything up to the freeroam finished, as well as the majority of it - just a little bit of the end left which I should be done with tomorrow. After that there's 2 more scenes left for the prologue - those should only take a day to put together. I didn't quite make the "few hundred" plan I had, but that was at least partially due to recovery taking a few days, so the work I got done was limited until I wasn't basically a zombie on painkillers. I did get well over a hundred finished though, so I'm happy with that. Also the freeroam ended up being a bit more work than I had anticipated, but we're through the majority of it now, just a few more small things to finish up on it, and I'll be moving on tomorrow.

A real quick overview of the freeroam (what they'll look like, how they'll work, etc).

So here's a basic overview of what you'll see (note: I still need to clean up the nav arrows, but that's a later on thing:)

Note the little icon on the bottom left. Hit that and....

Basically you'll be able to navigate through the free roam using either on-screen arrows (Like I said - still need to replace the ones in the image, but I needed something to write the code for), or using the nav screen on the bottom. You can open or close the screen as you please - it will auto-hide whenever you're in a conversation with someone, or when the freeroam event is over.

Just a couple more shots:

Note the characters with a slight outline and glow - in those screenshots, I have the mouse on top of them. Whenever you mouseover a character (or object) you can interact with, you'll see that outline and glow - indicating you can interact with them. 

Still to do, regarding free-roams - create an "objective list" - this will be placed somewhere near the top right corner. It'll be a small drop-down menu listing all of the things you'll be able to do in that freeroam. It'll also tell you which ones are mandatory, and which are optional.

I set it up this way so people have the option to skip directly from room to room (particularly will be useful later on for those who prefer to do multiple playthroughs!), or via direct navigation using arrow buttons on the screen.

A few notes: #1 some things may benefit from exploration. Example: In this freeroam event, entering the room with the dancing girl, and the tall girl drinking, triggers an event immediately when you enter the room. You could however theoretically bypass this event entirely by using the direct nav menu, and just never going to that room. Anything that is mandatory to the story will never be skippable, but certain things may be if you opt for direct navigation and skip certain rooms.

#2: This freeroam is fairly small in comparison to some later ones, but the system will work pretty much identically. In later ones, the nav menu will likely be scrollable - as the amount of rooms will likely take up more space than the screen provides. One small note on that as well - the larger nav menu currently stays open until you close it (or enter a conversation, or end the freeroam), so if you move rooms, it doesn't close. The only way to close it is either hit the close button, or end the free roam.

I still need to clean up the code quite a bit since it's currently a mess, but for starters I was making sure it was all functional. Now that it is, I'll worry about the rest at a later time (probably when I'm busy working on the next one).

Finally, a bit about polls. As mentioned, the credit shop and wallpapers will be tied to minigames (that will be the main purpose of most minigames - these sorts of extras!). Monday the first poll regarding them will go up. At the moment my current plan is to release with 7 wallpapers, and 20 or so total images for the credit shop. The poll on monday will be for the first series of those 20. I'll have more info on that monday with the poll.

That's all for now. Poll on Monday, and I'll have more progress and a little bit of character info next week. Until then, have a great week!

Progress Update

Man the hits just keep on coming. I finally got over the flu, and went right into what we'll call a "Dental emergency". In fact, this post is pre-written and scheduled to go out while I'm at the dentist, getting things finally taken care of!

That said, I did actually make some progress this week. Set up the new PC, got that up and running, and man does it zoom. I ran a quick test- a render on my old build that took 1 hr, took 13 minutes with the new one. 

Because of the whole "dental emergency" bit, plus having to spend a full day setting the new PC up, I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I did make some decent progress. I finished up all the renders for 3 scenes, and later today when I get back I'll work on the next one and should have that finished today as well. 

By next week I should be back on pace fully, (barring any more sudden emergencies), and then we'll start making some really swift progress. 

As of right now, here's where we stand. Ch1 I haven't really started on much. For the prologue, renders are at this point about 50% done - I have 3 major scenes, plus the game's first free roam to render, and the rest is done. I should easily be able to get all of that done next week (I expect free roams in general to take a lot longer than a normal scene, but this one is going to be fairly small so it shouldn't take more than a day or two), and then we'll be working on CH1. The first few environments for Ch1 are already built, plus about 50% of the biggest one of the chapter, so I should be able to make pretty good progress there as well for a while. Just looking at what I have, and what environments I still need to build, I should get through everything up to the first CH1 free roam (Much bigger than the prologue, and at about the halfway point of the chapter) this month without issue. How long that one takes me I honestly have no clue - I'll have to get there and see before I really have an idea how long they'll take to fully design. 

Luckily, while I was waiting on the new PC, I got the majority of the writing and coding finished - I'd estimate about 50% of the coding and 70-80% of the writing done. I'm going to pause on both of those for a while and focus all of my time on getting renders out as much as possible. 

That's all for this week - hopefully next week nothing major goes wrong, and I can knock out a few hundred in that time - that's the current goal at least - we'll see how it goes. Speaking of next week, next week I'm going to add the first poll! I'll give more details next week, but for now I'll be running some polls on all the "extras" in-game. (Stuff like the minigame renders you can buy, or phone wallpapers, etc). I have a few things I want to add, and have room for plenty others so I'm willing to let everyone else decide.

And for anyone wondering "Wait, won't doing those take time away from working on the game?" The answer is.... not really. Doing a single one of those, if I put some serious time into it, doesn't take more than a couple of hours, it ends up being the sort of thing you do to chill and relax when you absolutely need a break. Mostly, it's an exercise in avoiding burnout. During Alive I did quite a few of them on my downtime that I posted in various places (or added to the TV screens!) - this time around I just plan on adding them to the game directly, that's all. Honestly a lot of devs do these sorts of renders for that exact reason - sometimes you need to take a break, and do something "fun" - otherwise you quickly find yourself trying to "force" the work, and the quality suffers. Being able to break it up with something else every now and then helps you come back re-focused. Not that any of this really matters, it's just a thing I've seen people say to quite a few devs in the past, and honestly it's the sort of thing that doesn't take too much time and generally is actually helpful overall. 

Well, I'll be back next week with hopefully a screenshot or so, info on the poll, and a poll! Until then - Have a great week!