uncleartie

CPD v0.1.2 Release

I'm releasing it here for today to see if any problems crop up. I'll release it on itch and f95 in a day or two.

PC 

Mac 

Changelog:

-Added the ability to explore Bakersfield with Molly. Req: Molly Affection > 100 so she'll follow you on a date and a trigger that says she wants to explore the area (she says it during small talk moments at some locations and date sites or just ask about the surrounding area when talking to her outside her apartment)

-Added special intimate scene with Molly during exploring. Req: Molly Affection > 500 and have been intimate with her already (without rejecting her afterwards, thus locking yourself out of an intimate relationship with her)

-Added a park that can be used for dates and increasing your endurance for free that can be discovered during the exploring

-Added the ability to increase Molly's stats as well as your own at the library, gym and park

-Added the ability to do some specific with Molly at the park that is only available to her for doggirl reasons

-Fixed more time related stuff at the library so it will close properly

-Various jumps and bugs that were reported over the last couple of months

Enjoy! I'll start working on the Spooner Street exploration map soon.

September Progress Report

I'll keep this one short, I'm hoping to put the finishing touches on the next update and release it soon.

I originally planned to do both maps, Bakersfield and Spooner St, for the Molly Exploration Mini-game but considering how long it is taking to just get the Bakersfield one done, I'm going to split up the updates.

v0.1.2 will be the Bakersfield update and will feature the completed map for the exploration, a new area that can be unlocked by exploring, a new intimate scene with Molly if you met the requirements (over 500 affection and have been intimate before) and the ability to raise Molly's stats as well as your own. You'll need Endurance for the exploration but you can also raise her strength and knowledge should there be any obstacles to overcome.

This will be a test run to see if how the exploration mini-game is handled by the audience so I can polish anything out before starting the next map.

v0.1.3 will have the next area to explore and be in Spooner St. which I'm already excited to get started because I had a great idea for the map layout that will mess with people. Have fun with that.

Before I go, I'm looking for beta testers for v0.1.2. If you're free, let me know.

I'll put the finishing touches on the update in the meantime.

August Progress Report

I hope everyone's summer went well. It was a bit of a strange one this year I think. But let's dive into the report.

Designing the exploring mini-game has been pretty fun actually. I might have to do a real rpg/dungeon crawling game one day haha

Trying to turn the general idea of taking a doggirl for a walk around the neighbourhood and turn it into something attempting to resemble gameplay is really interesting. At the very least, it will be a good test to see if people have any sense of direction haha

Taking both the element of residential neighbourhoods are just grids and taking away any maps should create an uncanny feeling of being lost while walking a straight line. After it's release, hang around the comment sections for some laughs.

The plan for September is to just continue working on it. I don't have a release schedule for the next update. I'm just working on it whenever I get some ideas. 

I'm nearly finished the first map out of two and it's time to work on a little bit of a treasure hunt to spice things up a little. Adding a more excitable side to Molly as she nerds out about being in an adventure book is another thing I'm really enjoying as well. She needed something a little more than just being the quiet, bookworm-ish girl you drag around everywhere.

That'll be it for this one I think. Good look with September!

v0.1.1 Release and Changelog

Downloads: PC  Mac 

-Time will now move forward in the massage parlour
-When the clock rolls over to 12am on Sunday, the Gentleman's Club will no longer close early and be open the proper hours
-Time adjustments to private dances while working as a stripper
-Addition of being able to find a client for a private dance while working as a stripper
-You can no longer quit the stripper job before you accept it
-Having sex at the strip club will keep you at the strip club afterwards instead of teleporting you home
-Fixed the strength skill so it will now rise about C
-Added values to the character menu to see the progress to the next skill level up
-Fixed various broken jumps when trying to go places
-You can now speak to Molly at the grocery store without getting an error
-It is no longer required to buy something if you choose "shop" at the grocery store. You can now back out like normal
-Adjusted Molly's affection values so you can start dating her at 100 aff
-Probably some other small fixes I'm forgetting about

July Progress Report

Let's get right to it.

v0.1 of City of Primal Desires (CPD) was released on here July 19th and then I released it on itch.io and F95Zone on July 21st and both went well. I got some feedback on the content as well as some bugs to fix and potentially some new people following only in the server or patreon.

I was hoping to get v0.1.1 out a little sooner to fix those problems but ended up having a couple of busy weeks irl mixed with just wanting to redo a section.

I wanted to add a little more to the gentleman's club to make finding a specific client a little easier but didn't like the first draft of it so I scrapped it and have been redoing it. It's not even going to be very big or fancy but the first draft was just pretty bland and straight forward so I wanted to flavour it up a little. I should be done that soon enough.

Next will be v0.1.2 which will be dedicated to finishing Molly's content. I believe I had mention in previous updates that I wanted to add something specific to each character to make going through their routes feels a little different per person. Just to make each run through the game feel a little different or add a little more to the world.

For Molly, she will join you as you explore each district and find additional restaurants, shops, etc to visit, uncover secrets or, if you have that relationship with her, find more adult situations to end up in.

I'm still working out a lot of the details but I'm basing it around old text rpg/dungeon crawl-y content. (ie, go left, go right, solve how to open door, etc). Finally give the strength, endurance and knowledge skills a little more to do haha

Of course, everything is subject to change once I get into actually programming it but that will be my starting point for that.

I'll leave it off there and get back to work. Any questions, you can find me screaming at the clouds somewhere for all this damn rain.

The City of Primal Desires v0.1 Release

Morning. Let's see how this goes.

Obviously there's a lot of work still ahead of me but if you get an error screen, just email me a screenshot of it: uncleartiefillmore@gmail.com

Links:

PC 

Mac 

Official Game Announcement

I don't think I've done one of these yet. Just some simple explanations. Well, with the game going through some checks and hopefully set to launch next week, here's the official announcement.

Title: The City of Primal Desires

Genre: Sandbox, Text RPG, Historical Fantasy, Life Sim, Dating Sim

Description: 

The year is 1924 and you have decided it is high time to leave your country and find somewhere else to live. Hearing of a golden city in the west where you can go and get rich quick, you decide to head out there and try your luck.

Welcome to Cartersburg, the City of Primal Desires.

Gameplay:

It's a life sim with a character creator so you're mostly just roleplay the day to day life of whomever you create. Find love, get laid, get rich, live a cozy life. Depends on how you play it really. The city is pretty open and lets you do whatever you want. You just got to figure out what you want to do on your own. Everyone moves quick in the city and they aren't going to hold your hand.

Features:

Play as Male, Female or Futa. Human, Beast or something in between. Currently the options are: Human, Half-Cat, Half Dog, Feline and Canine but more will be added based on what people want to do.

Open Ended Dating: Currently there is only 1 dateable character but when you get her affection score past 200, you can ask her on a date, which just has her follow you around to anywhere you want to go in the city. Want to go to the gym then grab a slice of pizza afterwards? Do it. Want to do a little shopping and hit up a cafe afterwards? What's stopping you? Dates end when you take the person back to their house or they need to go to sleep or work.

Character Schedules and Moods: Each character will have a day-to-day schedule they are on depending on what there job is and interests. Their mood is also set to be generated every day based on different factors, including: whether they have to work that day, the weather and sometimes, just having a random downer day. I'm trying to make them a little unpredictable to make just the day-to-day life with them a little more interesting.

Adult Content: Work as a masseuse or just get a rub and tug on your own. Have you checked out the Gentleman's Club? I heard they are willing to offer some extra services in the private dance lounge. You could too, if you wanted. Of course, you could do it the old fashion way and date someone. You're choice. Once you get them in bed though, you better be ready for them. They aren't going to wait around for you to do stuff. They are fully capable of dictating the flow of the evening.

Future:

More Districts in the City: More jobs, more areas to date, more areas to buy stuff and explore. Jobs will have promotions based on your stats so be prepared to work for it if you want to rise to the top.

More Dateable Characters: I've got a few in development that will come in future updates and will all have a little something different you can do with them.

More Items to Spend Money On: Consume consume consume, baby. You're going to get rich anyhow, why not buy a fancy new house to live in. Maybe get some of that new technologies that people are talking about. I heard cars and telephones are going to be huge.

Overcome the Obstacles: The way to the top is easy...for some. Playing as a Halfbreed or Beast character will see you looked down on by the Humans of the city but a cunning Halfbreed knows that the only thing separating them from looking Humans is their ears and tail. Hiding those could open some doors for you...

Conclusion:

Yeah. I got a lot of work ahead of me. I'm, of course, nervous and excited to see how you guys enjoy this one. But, to be fair, I know it will take a little bit of time before I can fully show off everything I want to so bear with me on that one.

Thank you for reading. I've been trying to keep them short for easier reading but this one needed to be big.

Beta Testers Needed

Oook. This weekend I'll be ready to do a beta test on the new game. If you are free this weekend (July 14-16) and are interested, just comment here, I'll message you in the PMs when it comes time. 

I'm going to spend the rest of the week doing checks myself and then I'll make it available Friday for the testers. Please let me know if anything needs fixing. I'm really just looking for bugs and spelling/grammar bullshit. It's too early in development for anything else. I just want to make sure an error screen doesn't pop up if you click on a choice haha I'll create a channel for the beta testers in a moment. 

Thank you in advance to anyone that wants to help out.

June Progress Report

1 more building and I'll be starting the beta test.

The beta test will be simple enough. I'll schedule it for a weekend so the testers have some time. They would receive it the Friday and then have until Sunday night to submit their report so I can start work again on Monday and do whatever changes are necessary before a public release.

When I finish I'll put out a request for anyone that wishes to beta test.

Just got to finish this last building first haha It's the pain in the ass one. The Gentleman's Club if you will.

But anyways, Summer is here so I hope everyone is having a good time.

I'll post another message soon, hopefully.

Summer of 69 Sale

It finally happened. A sale so long in the making that Bryan Adams wrote a song about it in 1984. That's right it's the Summer of 69 Sale!

From today until the end of summer (September 23rd), My Catgirl Maid: Extra Fluffy Edition will be on sale for 69% off at itch.io ($1.55)

Now, now. Let's all settle down. There's enough catgirls for everyone and enough time to pick it up so don't rush. Let's play it all loosey goosey.  

Bryan. Play me out.

May Progress Report

The summer started in full force up here. I wasn't expecting it to hit over 30 degrees Celsius so suddenly but it's been brain melting this week.

Anyways, I posted on the 21st that I had finally completed the "wrestling" section of the game and the rest of the month was dedicated to unnecessarily long days at work and laying the groundwork for the next district.

As I predicted, it's been way easier to get the framework in place because of everything worked out in the first district. The only thing I'm debating to myself is whether to just get the basics for each building in place or go more in depth to try and save time on the next update. 

I think I'll just basics it for now. I want to dedicate the summer to getting an update out and making any changes to it while everything is still pretty simple and fluid. Most of the depth will come when more characters are added to the game anyway so little nitpicks can wait.

Thank for making it this far and I hope your June is a good one!

Quick Update of Game Progress

I'm going to be a little vague as this is a public post on Patreon and I need to stay within the guidelines.

So, I've finish the "wrestling" system for that game finally and it's certainly...something haha I wanted to build it off a turn based combat system to add a level of unpredictability to each session.

Obviously, there's no fighting. It's just you pick an action, they pick an action, somebody will eventually see the light. You can only do stuff to them, having stuff happen to you can be a little random chancy depending on how they feel, I guess.  

It'll definitely be something we tweak and work on for the entire duration of developing the game as beta testers and players offer feedback and general fixes. The thing is too damn big, there's no way I can see every action and random event myself.  

Next I'll be moving onto getting that second district down so we can start play testing this game

April Progress Report

This was a long month, wasn't it?

Continuing from last month's post, I was able to finish the first district easily enough and then I decide to tackle the more...adult aspect of the game and that was the rest of the month for me.

I wasn't originally planning for it to be this big but it happens. I'm at about 60 different things you can do based on different partners and situations and we'll see what the final number comes out to when I'm done. This is going to be an interesting system, that's for sure.

Finishing that will be my plan for this month. Like everything else, I'm trying to set it up so it's just plug in and play for future content, instead of needing big rewrites every time I add a new character.

I hope May goes well for everyone. See you next time.

March Progress Report

I hope everyone's March went well. We can consider this one a Spring update as I'll post my status and plan for the next couple of months.

Status: I'm nearly done with the first district and first character in this new game, which doesn't sound like much but with only getting to work 1-2 hrs a week on the game, it is what it is I'm afraid. 

Things will pick up though. Because it's the first character and first district, most of the time was just spent trying to figure out a lot of the core gameplay features and how I wanted the world and progress to be structured. With their completion, it becomes much quicker and easier to add additional characters and districts and keep expanding the game.

Plan: For the first release, I want to get 1 character and 2 districts complete. I feel that will be enough content that I can get feedback and make quality of life changes or restructure systems before beginning major expansion.

Predicted Update Style:

0.1 - First demo

0.2 - New characters for existing districts

0.3 - New districts

0.4 - New characters

etc

I have 6 characters and 5 districts initially planned but that'll grow once I get the chance to actually plan for new content.

So I hoping for the Spring to bring me some more time to work on the game so I can finally get some of these ideas going. A month or two from now, I might start trying to get some beta testers together to help go through the game. Feels like 1 millions to check at the same time whenever I double check anything. I'm going to need some fresh eyes soon.

Until then, I hope the start of Spring has been good so far and I wish everyone luck in dealing with allergies when they start in April!

February Progress Report

Short month. Short update. I think you guys prefer it that way anyhow.

Progress continues to be made. Work continues to be a pain in the butt.

See you next month!

January Progress Report

I'm going to try and keep this one shorter and I expect there will be some confusion so please ask your questions.

I said in my last novel of a blog post that I would discuss my new game's setting and focus more here so that's my plan.

The game will be a Text RPG/Dating Sim with some life sim elements thrown in for some extra gameplay. In a nutshell: Get rich and date people.

I want to make a quicker paced game where you can restart with different characters and try dating different people and different routes to get to the top without too much grinding.

There will be some elements that will allow for a slower game if you want but I've been feeling nostalgic for older adult flash games where you can knock out a playthrough in an afternoon.

The setting will be in a single city in the 1920s. I wanted a good time period that was all about style and hedonistic lifestyles and I think the Roaring 20s would be interesting.

There will be multiple races from Humans to Beast People with the halfies in between. So you know, go vanilla, My Catgirl Maid or full blown furry if you want.

Updates will be focused on adding new districts to the city or expanding on existing one as well as adding more dateable characters.

I'm feeling good about this idea. It's just me working on it and is admitably slow moving but I'm hammering out the finer details and trying to program when I can.

Thanks for reading. See you next month.

A Much Better Update Post Than Last Time

I had kept my usual monthly post short and with things going a little better health wise (no covid but lots of headaches because of this damn weather), I should be able to stumble my way through a proper one now.

I'm going to try and not be too tight lipped on the details with this one, mainly because I don't need to fear giving up spoilers. Way too easy to do that accidentally with stories.

I spent some time back in November playing around with Twine because it's the usual engine for these...text RPG/dating sim bang-a-thons. Think Degrees of Lewdity and The Company as examples. Pretty quickly, I determined if you were going to get anything done in Twine, you needed to know some Javascript. 

Which I had no experience with.

In fact, last time I worked with anything with the word "Java" in it was in high school, so you know, 20 years ago. Yay.

Long story short: I didn't enjoy using Twine so I dropped it. Back to Ren'py, baby. Haha hey, it's been what I've been using for like 4-5 years now and I've made multiple games with it and worked on countless more projects. Makes sense to try and expand it into what I need. And, so far so good actually.

December was me focusing on creating systems more than creating a world. (Well, expect for around Christmas when I took a break from programming to practice coughing.)

Date, time, weather and a system where affection growth is based on the character's mood at the time, that's been the groundwork I have been laying down for now. 

Haha actually, the weather system is a chaotic mess that I'll polish up a little eventually. No real rhythm or reason so to speak, just pure randomness. I was going to alter it but then I remembered that I've looked out a window more than once in my life so I left it. Once there's more gameplay elements to the game, I'll make some changes to make sure it doesn't hinder anything important. For the first update at least, I'll leave the original system in place.

There's still tons more to put into the game. Honestly, it can be overwhelming trying to plan anything just because you can start thinking about the weather and end up trying to figure out an inventory system not even 5 minutes later and your notepad looks like a mess haha

It's all part of the learning experience though. This is the first time I've ever worked on something like this and it will show. Thankfully, these types of projects offer lots of room to grow. Nobody's expecting a perfectly polished finished product out of version 0.1 right? This is going to be a big and highly customisable project that will, hopefully, be worked on for many years. One that I hope to work on with you guys.

So once this game gets off the ground, I'll be looking to hold some discussions about what new characters and areas could be added to it. Whether that goes well or not, who knows, should be at least mildly interesting for the drama though.

This has gone on long enough so I'll wrap up. Next update will be about the game's setting and focus and will probably be at the end of the month. I have no idea how to post screenshot updates about this project given its nature but I still might do 1 just because everyone loves walls of text in boxes.

Thanks for reading this massive update. I'm around if you have questions.

End of 2022 Post

I'm going to keep this one short and sweet because it's been covid round 2 around here since Christmas.

I hope everyone has had an interesting holiday and new years and that you have some exciting plans for 2023.

I'm looking forward to 2023 myself and the development of my new project. Thank you to everyone that has stuck around and continues to read these.

See you in the next post when I'm a little more healthier.

November Monthly Report

Another month done and I'd like to say things are moving pretty good. While I'm lying, I'd also like to say I'm an giant moose with a Swedish accent.

Haha The reality is: there's nothing really to report.

October I had focused on converting Open Road to a novel so for this month, I focused on laying the ground work for the text adventure game.

Balancing the 2 projects will mean this will be the status quo for a little bit. Particularly in the early stages of the text adventure which is more focused on getting the core systems programmed and set up. 

It'll give time for Margo to re-edit Open Road as her schedule has been really busy so she hasn't had time to sit down yet. I'm writing chapters slowly still so her pile is going to keep getting larger but she'll get through it, probably when the job finally lets up a little.

In conclusion: stuff is happening. It's all the unsexy parts of creative projects, but its happening.

Open Road -The Visualess Novel-

A couple notes, because you can't escape me. 

Spacing might be a little weird. I noticed between different browsers that it can be spaced different. I used Chrome to format it but I know it looks a little odd in Firefox so just ignore it if the spacing is odd. (If you use Safari or Edge, God help you. It'll probably be in Romanian or something. I haven't checked.)

Second, Margo will be continuing to edit it, she just hasn't had the chance because October was busy as hell at our job. Prepare for a couple errors.

This isn't a professional release, just something I'm doing for fun. I have no plans to do anything with it and it will probably be written a little strangely as I try to turn this non-linear idea, into a linear story. Just have fun with it.

If you've played the demo, Chapter 12 is the start of the new content but I'd still recommend starting over because of the expanding and minor changes to the narration I had to do. Jump to it with Find (Ctrl+F) and then type in Chapter 12.

Google Docs, Baby 

October Monthly Report

What a month.

First off, I'd like to think everyone for continuing to follow me after Open Road's release and then sudden shutting down. That's left 2 major questions that will need to be addressed and after the month, I have the answer to each that I hope will be satisfying.

What will happen to the story of Open Road?

Its days as a game and interactive fiction is over but it will continue on in a more traditional book format. I spent the month reformatting all 100+ pages in a long and tedious process and finished it today. I'll release a post about it after this and will continue to write the story in that format moving forward.

What will be the next game idea?

I don't have a complete answer on that. More just feelings of stuff I want to do and stuff I don't want to do. (Spent all month working on reformatting Open Road. Seriously, reformatting is a sloooooow process). I know that I don't want to make another visual novel. My feelings after My Catgirl Maid remain the same. I want to work in a different game format. 

I'm currently researching and experimenting with Twine, which makes text-based adventure games. It'd be fun to make a life-sim game where I can just let you guys loose in a world of my creation and see what happens. You know, rats, mazes, etc haha

I'm also thinking this game will involve adult content. We all know how much I suck with basic marketing principles like: updating regularly and viewer engagement, so it makes sense to stick to the genre I know haha Plus with me not making visual novels, the main complaints I had about doing adult content are gone so it's only natural.

Once again, thank you for continuing to read these. I hope this answers a few questions at least. You know where to find me if you have more.

Important Announcement for Open Road's Future

When it was time to release the Alpha for Open Road, I said I was testing to see how the story would be received. I was curious to see if the My Catgirl Maid crowd would follow me into this next project and how it would be received by them. It would appear that I overestimated how many people that would be.

With how big this project was planning to be, I needed to make a business decision on whether it would be best to continue to invest into it. After thinking it through, I have decided that the best course of action would be to stop production of Open Road immediately.

If you had played it, thank you very much. I'm sorry that it will be all that comes out of that story.

I am, of course, always open for questions if you have any. I simply just wanted to keep this post quick and simple.

Thank you again for your understanding.

Open Road Alpha Release

Okie dokie. Here we go.

Read these:

Story Summary 

Technical Stuff About Bug Reporting and Controls for the VN 

Game is here:

Windows

Mac 

Have fun!

Technical Stuff About the Release

Expectations

This is an Alpha of the VN so it is a bit raw in some aspects. Menus and GUI are sort of in place and there is no music because of the budget. They weren't the point of this release. I simply want to see how the story is received and make changes to it while it is still early if needed. Feedback, good or bad, is greatly appreciated.

Engine

Ren'py. I'm using the newest version: Ren'py 8 which, I believe, is still not compatible with Linux and the plugin to make Web versions. The Web version I'm not concerned with but it should be stated that Linux might not be supported for a little bit. I'm keeping an eye on it but best to stick to Windows or Mac for a bit.

Also, it should be noted, I have no plans for an Android version of the game in the near future. Too much else to worry about right now with actually getting GUI in there before experimenting to make sure it is compatible with an Android version.

Controls

LMB - Advance story

Middle Mouse Wheel - Rollback Text

RMB - Open Game Menu

I left the default game menu in place so it has the "Help" menu. In that menu is all the default hotkeys that Ren'py uses. If you play a lot of Ren'py games you'll be happy to know that those hotkeys will work for about 95% of them.

Bug/Spelling Error Reporting

Same as last time, send it to my email: uncleartiefillmore@gmail.com or leave it in a comment on the release post.

I'll set up a channel in the discord server as well for people that use that.

For spelling, I ask that you avoid anything that falls into the category of "UK English and US English have different spelling rules". I use a lot of UK spelling rules, as you probably noticed in My Catgirl Maid or anything I've written ever, and will ignore people about words like "centre" and "colour". I just want to get those easy to miss extra letters or missing letters typos like "the would" instead of "they would".

Here's a handy little site to explain more on English spelling rules or you can just google the individual word if you are unsure: https://www.oxfordinternationalenglish.com/differences-in-british-and-american-spelling/ 

What to Expect When You're Expecting

This will be a collection of all the information of the game that I had mentioned over the last year as well as some new information. My hope is that it will answer 90% of the initial questions people will have about the VN without spoiling any of the story.

Name: It's All Fun and Games on the Open Road

Short Name: Open Road or OR

Blurb: The "Golden Age of the Caravan" is upon us! Fuelled by romanticized stories of the open road, Tony leaves his home ready to follow in his late father's footsteps.

With a small team of misfits from all walks of life, Tony is ready to become the best caravan master in the world. If only he could figure out how to get a job...

Story Genre: Fantasy, Adventure, Comedy, Drama.

Translation: You follow the ups and downs of an ensemble cast as they explore the world and people in it. Note the lack of "Action" and "Romance" tags. It's not focused on fighting and people aren't going to date each other. "Found Family" tropes and learning about the world and lore is what you can expect.

Game Genre: Visual Novel

Translation: You're going to read. A lot. It's a book. Reading, reading, reading and then more reading. You can select chapters to change up the order and later in the story some chapters will lock you out of others as you follow routes but still, you be reading, dawg.

Conclusion: The Adventure genre can catch people off guard if they are unfamiliar with it. It's priority is 1) Setting 2) Characters and 3) Plot. In a way, it's like the Slice of Life genre in that it can be a little slower paced and focusing on many smaller plot threads than one big one. This is typically why you will see "Adventure" paired up with "Action" in genre tags.

A good example of adding Action to Adventure stories is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. "Ensemble cast walks to mountain and dumps off magic ring in fantasy land" is a pretty simple adventure plot line. They then throw in some big battle scenes to make sure some of the audience haven't fallen asleep during the journey haha

If you want an example of Adventure without the Action then Terry Pratchett's "The Colour of Magic" is a pretty safe choice. It's premise is "Two people explore fantasy land as tourists and take in the sights. Comedy ensues." More character and world focused so the comedy has something to work with.

To conclude my conclusion: If you don't like slower paced books that focus on world building and lore, you might want to skip this one. Just fair warning.

Be Ready

Wednesday September 28th.

I'll be releasing the alpha.

Make sure you're ready.

August Progress Report

Despite how long this month was, I didn't want it to end. I was liking the whole "going on forever" thing it was doing. 

Good progress was made this month which is what I wanted before work turned back into full-time hours for me. I'm hoping that by running the format I'm doing, with the story being a series of shorter chapters, that writing will go quite smoothly despite the fall rush at work. That was why I choose this format after all haha I'd hate for the next 4 months to be a waste with little progress.

Just in case though, I'm making some changes to my upload schedule. I was going to release the Alpha and then nothing until the Demo but it might be too long a distance between those releases so I'll probably do small updates when some chapters/art are completed. I'll use the old My Catgirl Maid style with scaling patreon first, public last. After the Demo, it will continue with the plan of being patreon exclusive until release. By then, most of the art will be done and it will be just me trying to crank out chapter after chapter as I complete them.

That should work. In theory at least haha

I'll leave it at that for now. I hope people's Septembers are decent. I'm hoping to have all the character art for the Alpha finished this month. I should be getting a few characters in the next week here but we'll see.

Take it easy!

Current Status of the Alpha Build:

Writing: Complete

Editing: Complete

Backgrounds: Complete

Characters: 7/12

Programming/GUI: 80%

July Progress Report

I delayed this one as I was waiting to receive another character sprite and wanted to make sure I included the number in the progress report here.

Current Status of what we'll call the "Closed Alpha Build" of Open Road:

Writing: Complete

Editing: Complete

Backgrounds: 11/13

Sprites: 4/12

Programming/Gui: Starting soon

Music: Not happening

So yeah, looking good. I was able to add three character artists to the game and we're starting to see some good progress. No word from Toxicguest yet but we do need to keep moving forward. I hope to hear from them eventually but in the meantime, welcome Julioaruka, MANGO and Mongdej to the team. You can find links to their other work in my "About me" section on patreon here.

I'm hoping August will be equally as productive and I'll continue to have good news for everyone again.

Thank you and I hope you're enjoying your summer too.

June Progress Report

I hope everyone is enjoying the start of their summer.

I wasn't able to get as far as I wanted this month, but that was because I underestimated the exposition section of the game.  Exposition is purposely dry so it can be a little stiff to write and it took a longer than expected to find a way to deliver it all in a way that I enjoy.

I trust most people won't worry too much about this section but for the few that enjoy looking through all the little lore tidbits, I hope it will be interesting at least.

We also hit a major snag with art this month as it appears Toxicguest has gone missing. Since they reported in at the end of May, I haven't heard anything back and they haven't replied to any of my emails. I'm starting to get a little worried that something has happened to them and I will kept trying to make sure they are ok.

In the meantime though, I have to make a business decision and start moving forward with some additional artists. I'll keep holding out a little while longer that Toxicguest will return with some good news, but in the meantime, I have two new artists I'm speaking with that will be starting in July after they finish up some business.

We should start to see some character art this month.

Other than that, I'm interested to see how this summer will play out. I'll see you next month.

May Progress Report

I realised today that I haven't done this yet. Sorry about that.

May was an interesting month as I spent the first week and a half fighting Covid and then just catching up on work after that. Amidst all that, I was able to get some decent writing done and I'm nearing the end of what would be the game's intro before it slips off into the individual stories. With work finally slowing down, I would like to finish everything I would need for the first update and beginning laying down the programming foundations, hopefully by the end of the month.

Art is continuing at it's usual pace. Backgrounds are getting done at a steady rate and I'm hoping to get a final version of one of the characters soon. With a final, I can hire more artists to help get through the massive pile of characters needed for this game.

For shits and giggles, I counted up all the backgrounds and characters in total that I will need for this game and ended up with over 30 of each. I'll definitely need to get a few more people on the team so we're not waiting for years before the first update comes out.

Margo and I are liking how this one is shaping up and I'm curious to see what people will think. I look forward to sharing another weird tale involving anime catgirls with you.

Take it easy and enjoy allergy season.