When I started work on v0.26.0 of Lab Rats 2 and planned out the new taboo system I knew there was going to be a fair amount of dialogue that would have to be written. This was good, since variations in dialogue and special dialogue for key moments is part of what makes each moment in the game feel unique. I don't think I quite realised how much dialogue I would end up having to write though: A couple of days after the patron release and I'm still writing it!
v0.26.0 incl...
2020-03-04 09:57:38 +0000 UTC
View Post
Lab Rats 2 v0.26.0 is live! Get it here!
PC: Lab Rats 2 v0.26.0-PC
Mac: Lab Rats 2 v0.26.0-Mac
Android: Lab Rats 2 v0.26.0-Android&nbs...
2020-03-01 11:22:12 +0000 UTC
View Post
Another relatively dry update for tonight: I've still just been writing a ton of dialogue for the new taboo break system. I've added roughly 28,000 words of dialogue already, spread across all of the different sex positions and personality types. There are still a few more special personalities to go before I'm done with the raw writing, then I need to go through all of the existing events and flag what events should be affected by taboos.
There are a few items on my TODO list that may ...
2020-02-25 09:26:47 +0000 UTC
View Post
I don't have any fancy technical updates for today, just a report that I'm chugging through all the new dialogue for the new "taboo break" dialogue. This is all dialogue that comes up the first time you cross some sort of threshold with a girl - see her naked, have her touch your dick, fuck her, etc. I am currently working on finishing the main personality types, then I will be moving on to the special characters like your mother and sister. This dialogue should add some narrative weight to t...
2020-02-19 11:01:30 +0000 UTC
View Post
It's been a few days since my last progress/planning update for v0.26, and I've been hard at work since then. The community response I got about adding sound/music has convinced me it's less of a priority than I first believed, so I have been focusing my efforts planning and writing new sections of dialogue, as well as on some general cleanup. For anyone experiencing bugs with the animation system: I'm waiting on a new monitor with a different resolution which should give me a test platform t...
2020-02-15 08:44:16 +0000 UTC
View Post
v0.25.1 is in the wild and seems to be doing well, although there are some scaling and memory issues that I need to track down. That means it's time to do a little planning for next months release and what it should include.
When I was testing v0.25.1 one thing jumped out at me immediately - the game feels eerily silent when there are characters moving. I didn't expect it, but the movement heavily implies that there should be sound going on as well. I've been putting off sound ...
2020-02-10 10:14:00 +0000 UTC
View Post
Lab Rats 2 v0.25.1 is live! Get it here!
PC: Lab Rats 2 v0.25.1-PC
Mac: Lab Rats 2 v0.25.1-Mac
Android: Lab Rats 2 v0.25.1-Android&nbs...
2020-02-08 10:43:11 +0000 UTC
View Post
First, the android version of v0.25.0 has been posted! If you're a patron you can find it here! The 2D animation is a highly experimental feature, so expect it to be a little unstable and leave a bug report in the comments if you run into any issues.
If you missed it, the original release of v0.25.0 has also been patched and replaced by v0.25.0a. This new version includes a fix for a major me...
2020-02-03 10:29:17 +0000 UTC
View Post
Lab Rats 2 v0.25.0 is live! Download it here!
Edit: There was a memory leak in v0.25.0. It has been resolved in v0.25.0a, which is available from the links below.
PC: Lab Rats 2 v0.25.0a-pc
Mac: Lab Rats 2 v0.25.0a-mac
Android: 2020-02-01 11:56:35 +0000 UTC
View Post
It feels a little strange to near the end of a three week long development and still not quite feel confident everything is going to work, but the last bits of the shader animation system are all finished up now. At last I can breath a sigh of relief and declare that it's all going to work! (Probably! Hopefully! Android testing still needs to be done...)
The mechanical core of the animation system was finished a couple of days ago, and since then I have been integrating it with the exis...
2020-01-27 10:15:33 +0000 UTC
View Post
Life has been a little busy the last few days, but work on the new animation system has been continuing and is almost done. I've implemented an automated system to generate region weight maps for places like a girls breasts and ass, so I can now easily pick out which parts I want to have an animation effect. I have reworked the display area for girl, shrinking the section of the screen they cover to prevent them from dominating the entire UI and adding a background and border. It's a...
2020-01-23 09:22:29 +0000 UTC
View Post
It took longer than I thought it would to get shader animations working in Lab Rats 2, but at long last (and with a few concessions) I have it working! No .gif previews today because I still have a lot of polishing to do before it's pretty, but all of the technical problems have been solved or sidestepped.
Let's start by following up on my most promising lead from my last post: the software renderer. If Ren'py can't get hardware rendering working it falls back to software rendering, whi...
2020-01-19 10:14:20 +0000 UTC
View Post
It's a rather boring progress update for the last couple of days, as they have been dominated by documentation reading and experimentation. I have continued to work on core of the soon-to-be animation system, which revolves around turning a Ren'py displayable into a static image. This static image can then be manipulated by shaders, which give me direct access to pixel-by-pixel control if I want it.
The bad news first: as best as I can find I am one of a very few number of people who ha...
2020-01-16 11:07:28 +0000 UTC
View Post
I was planning on having this post up two days ago (and ideally with a different outcome), but things didn't exactly go to plan. If you've been following the development of Lab Rats 2 for a while you may remember some of my experiments with shader based animation, last seen here . Providing some basic animation to the characters of LR2 has been a little pet project of mine for a long time now, and t...
2020-01-12 10:35:43 +0000 UTC
View Post
Lab Rats 2 v0.24.1 is live! Get it here!
PC: Lab Rats 2 v0.24.1-PC
Mac: Lab Rats 2 v0.24.1-Mac
Android: Lab Rats 2 v0.24.1-Android
LR2 v0.24.1 is finished and all ready for it's public release. A big chunk of work this month was spent behind the scenes updating the rendering system u...
2020-01-08 11:29:53 +0000 UTC
View Post
v0.24.0 has been out in the wild with patrons for a few days and I've been chewing through bug reports as they pop up. Between bug fixing bouts I have also been working on the internal clothing system of Lab Rats 2 and adding something I've been thinking about for a while: mandatory accessories.
Mandatory accessories are clothing items (generally accessories, but in theory they could be any item at all as long as there is no layering conflict) that a girl wears independently of any spec...
2020-01-05 08:53:22 +0000 UTC
View Post
Lab Rats 2 v0.24.0 is Live! Get it here!
PC: Lab Rats 2 v0.24.0-PC
Mac: Lab Rats 2 v0.24.0-Mac
Android: Lab Rats 2 v0.24.0-Android&nbs...
2020-01-01 12:11:23 +0000 UTC
View Post
Christmas celebrations have been, and continue to, keep me busy, which means I'm going to keep this post short and use what time I have to squeeze some more content in for v0.24.0! My last couple days have been spent adding a few clothing items (and at last a creampie cum item) and expanding the affair role to include some of the things you can normally do with a girlfriend (ask her to get a boobjob, for example).
Next up I want to take a look at the way clothing sluttiness is calculate...
2019-12-26 07:01:58 +0000 UTC
View Post
I promised it and it's finally here, a detailed look at the save/load bug that popped up in v0.23.1 when it was first released. This post is going to be a look into the technical details of Lab Rats 2 and Python that caused the bug, and may accidentally contain some wisdom about code design. If that interests you, read on!
First, let's cover what the bug actually was. For the first two days after the release of v0.23.1 almost all games would crash when you attempted to save. The stack t...
2019-12-21 09:33:56 +0000 UTC
View Post
It was about time that my rendering automation got some love. For the last week or so I have been planning and coding a ground-up rewrite of the scripts that generate the image sets used in Lab Rats 2. Tonight, the refactoring is complete! This means I've replicated all of the previous functionality while clearing out a lot of poor design decisions made as the script was created bit-by-bit.
The rewrite took a bit longer than I anticipated, but looking at the state of the code now I'm gl...
2019-12-17 07:47:29 +0000 UTC
View Post
It's been a while since I put some real time and effort into my rendering automation, which has resulted in a bunch of less than ideal hacks. I'm taking some time now to do a complete rewrite and redesign of it, which should make the code much more maintainable and expandable. Once I've replicated the existing functionality I will be looking to set up a few more items to render, most likely a big collection of new cum shots and creampies. Now that it's possible to have a sexual encounter with...
2019-12-13 09:34:09 +0000 UTC
View Post
Lab Rats 2 v0.23.1 had a couple of bugs, the most critical of which prevented saving/loading when any character had a saved limited time event. I've fixed the cause and v0.23.2 is now available. I'll probably do a dev post about it in the near future, because it was an interesting one. You can find the download links to v0.23.2 here.
While I was at it I also fixed up a few other bugs that wer...
2019-12-10 10:20:28 +0000 UTC
View Post
There were conflicts with a new feature added in 0.23.1 and Ren'py's saving system that snuck past me and have been causing issues. I believe I have found and fixed the issue, but will be spending another day troubleshooting, then re-building and re-uploading v0.23.1 to include this fix by default. Until then, you can download the patched script file here:
Lab Rats 2 v0.23.1-Fix
2019-12-09 08:46:45 +0000 UTC
View Post
Get it Here!
***IMPORTANT***
v0.23.1 had a few bugs related to saving and loading, v0.23.2 includes fixes and has now replaced it.
PC: Lab Rats 2 v0.23.2-PC
Mac: Lab Rats 2 v0.23.2-Mac
Android: 2019-12-08 10:51:31 +0000 UTC
View Post
It's that wonderful time between the patron bug testing release and the public release, which means lots of bug hunting and some general polish on the state of the game. This week I had also planned to do some forward planning and experimentation with a new feature, but a couple particularly productive nights turned that into a full fledged feature that will be coming out with v0.23.1 in a couple of days!
The public version of v0.23 will include "limited time events", which are normal r...
2019-12-05 08:01:23 +0000 UTC
View Post
Lab Rats 2 v0.23.0 is Live! Get it here!
PC: Lab Rats 2 v0.23.0-PC
Mac: Lab Rats 2 v0.23.0-Mac
Android: Lab Rats 2 v0.23.0-Android&nbs...
2019-12-01 11:06:47 +0000 UTC
View Post
Alongside the improved sex system being worked on for v0.23 I have also been working on the balance of the individual positions possible in the game. I've done some spread sheeting and math with the current positions and modified their values to more accurately reflect the new mechanics (blowjobs now take more of a girls energy and give her little arousal, while the reverse it true for you, for example). Laying out the existing positions also highlighted some obvious gaps in the position line...
2019-11-26 08:55:33 +0000 UTC
View Post
Just a quick update for tonight, letting you know what's going on with development for v0.23! I've finished the last bits of the refactored sex system and gone through all of the events that made use of it and edited them to work with the updated system. For the most part the event editing has been a simple matter of correcting references to if a girl orgasms, but the affair fuck-date required some extra work. It now gives you a kick of energy after each round with your partner, decreasing ea...
2019-11-21 08:43:25 +0000 UTC
View Post
Last dev log I talked about the game play changes I was planning for the sex system of Lab Rats 2. Since then I've sat down, looked through the existing code for the system, and decided it's time for it all to be re-written. Bit by bit the old system had built up a bunch of kludges that worked but limited what I could do or how elegantly I could do it. I've pulled out all the old code, worked out how the new code is going to work on a conceptual level, and I'm now in the process of writing it...
2019-11-16 08:15:00 +0000 UTC
View Post
I mentioned in a previous dev log that the sex system of Lab Rats 2 was due for an overhaul and to look out for a post detailed exactly what that overhaul would include. Well, this is that post! One of the main features of v0.23 is going to be an updated sex system, and the changes are going to influence other aspects of the game.
The first step in fixing anything is identifying what's broken. For me, there are two major problems that stick out. First, the system fails to support pleasu...
2019-11-12 09:05:28 +0000 UTC
View Post
