Naughty Road

Valentine's wallpaper - Unchained Melody

Sunlight falls through a skylight, warming up the messy studio apartment where four wet hands slide over a big lump of slippery clay, kneading, pushing, and squeezing. Oh my. 

Today's wallpaper is inspired by that scene. It came together surprisingly fast, but it still had a few nice challenges. For one, I rigged my first ever object for this, to help create a suggestive pose for one lucky piece of crockery. It also involved some fun with materials and tex...

The zombie author.

I'm usually a strong proponent of the idea that the author is dead, and the only thing that matters is the public perception of a work. It doesn't matter what the author meant if the public doesn't pick it up, and if the public picks something up the author never thought of, that's part of the magic of creating too. 

I've mentioned before that a kind of strange feeling comes over me once I've released a chapter, and when I play through that content again, it doesn't feel like it's ...

Wallpaper: Macy and Denise are ready for takeoff.

Oh no! With Santa down with the flu, who will deliver all those presents? It's up to our girls to step up and save the day. How hard can it be to fly one of these things anyway?

Please enjoy this holiday themed wallpaper. I've also written a LABP (long ass blog post) that goes into a bit more detail about making this one, which you'll find one post down.

As usual, 4k and no title versions are attached below.

Kitbashing props and costumes

Right, another long ass blogpost about making stuff. In this one, I talk a little about kit bashing.

Define kitbashing

For those of you that don't know what it is, Wiktionary defines it as "To create a new scale model using pieces from existing commercial kits."

2023-12-17 09:58:52 +0000 UTC View Post

The future of Light of my Life

Here's a post that's a bit overdue, but I've had a lot to think about when it comes to this subject, and, well, just the action of writing it up here sort of pins it down and makes it real, and that's a scary proposition, and an exercise that I didn't particularly enjoy.

But I should really bite that bullet, so lets get it over with, even if it is scary. In this post, I'm going to be pretty open about my thoughts and concerns. I hope that doesn't leave a bitter taste in your mouth, I ju...

C7 post mortem, part 2: opting out is missing out

A few posts back a did a little post mortem and in it, I mentioned I had omitted the write-up I'd made about feedback I received with regard to issues people had had with the content and story development of chapter 7. I left a little poll up asking if you'd be interested in that.

I must admit I'm still having some reservations, as I don't feel this is really worth publishing on its own. It's very much navel staring. It's the author rising from his grave to berate the reader for daring ...

Guilty pleasures

As some of you may know, customizing assets and kit bashing is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine, and I wanted to share one with you that I whipped up the other day. This one involved a quick and dirty outfit design, a quick and dirty pose, a bit of quick and dirty graphic design and a quick and dirty retexturing of an old asset I found somewhere in my stash of random stuff, but I'm pretty happy about how it all turned out.

Besides being a lot of fun to do, I feel these little touche...

Halloween Wallpaper - The Sorceress' Apprentices

When a young apprentice stumbles upon an ancient tome containing forbidden knowledge well above her level, things go horribly wrong (or maybe, horribly right?) 

However it turns out, please enjoy this Halloween wallpaper that may be a little light on spooky stuff, even if there are witches, but it's got plenty of boob to make up for it. Enjoy!

As usual, 4k and textless versions attached below.

Chapter 7: a sort of post mortem in one part (or two?)

While I'm busy figuring out the direction for the next part of Light of my Life, blocking out chapter 8, and prototyping a convenient, unintrusive way to continue in a new, clean installation for the next chapter, I've also taken some time to do a bit of a post mortem. I'm not usually in the habit of doing so, but I felt it was in order in this case, as I felt this release was particularly bumpy and unpleasant.

And while I fully intended to also include a section here about the content ...

Final release for Light of my Life chapters 1-7

This is the last update for Light of my Life, chapters 1 through 7, hence the update of the version number to 1.0.0. At this time, the assembly is getting so big, it's stressing a lot of hardware with modest specs out, so chapter 8 will be released as a fresh new installation, and you should be able to seamlessly pick up there where you left off on chapter 7.

This update also adds achievements, so that is a nice addition I feel, to finish work on this build on.

2023-09-17 17:10:22 +0000 UTC View Post

Some bad news.

Well, the title says it all, really. After reviewing Light of my Life, Steam's declined to sell the title on their store, and has removed the store page there effective immediately. Oh well, I was hoping it'd help me make an extra buck on the side, but it seems it was not meant to be.

On the up side, Light of my life now has achievements, and even if they don't hook up to a back-end, they still work fine within the game. And it received a good once over for some parts in the earlier cha...

Wallpaper: Satisfaction (girls at work)

Time for another wallpaper. The girls are busy building a better future.

An straight forward one to ease back into it, this one in honor of this unexpected spell of hot, hot weather over the weekend, and of course the banger by Benny Benassi. I hope you enjoy it!

On the technical side, having fun with sweaty skin shells, with a bit of a challenge to fit the shell textures for the naughty bits (NSFW version) because unlike most shell textures, this one came with an incompatible UV....

Steam version - status update

I'm about to stick a fork in the Steam version, and in true keeping with the old 20-80 rule, some of the most trivial things seem to drag on the longest (looking at you, steam deck virtual keyboard). 

Anyhow, with it comes some long overdue clean up, getting a last few placeholder art assets out, cleaning up a few straggler issues from chapter 7, finally verifying controller support and making a few quality of life tweaks there (who knew that worked mostly out of the box), and last...

Light of my Life update 0.7.4

This is a small hotfix, fixing a two small graphics issues where images of Brooke and Sara wouldn't show up in the endgame summary, and Brooke would not show up when sneaking past the Coven.

• All platforms: Itch.IO
• PC/Linux: MEGA - 2023-08-31 16:37:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Are choices with only one option bad design?

Note, some very mild chapter 7 spoilers in this one.

I get this one quite a few times, and it always surprises me. Maybe it surprises you too, so let me take a moment to lay it out.

The central premise of the gripe is:

A menu option with one option only is bad design. A single choice isn't a choice, and you should not bother the user with it.

CompuPartner 3000

Getting Light of my Life ready to go on Steam is a really good reason to go over the game and finally get rid of a final few placeholders or near-placeholders, and I'd like to share one of those with you here. Behold, CompuPartner 3000 in all its former glory.

The previous image was a really horrible public domain photo with a heavy filter applied, and that just looked so out of place.

In other news, I'll be preparing a little patch file you can drop into the game directory of the...

Light of my Life Chapter 7 Update 0.7.3

This'll be the penultimate update for chapter 7 of Light of my Life I hope. After this, it's the Steam version, and when that goes up I'll probably push out a final version where I strip out the scene wheedling for adding it to the wish list there.

All in all, nothing major fixed, but I upgraded the ren'py version of PC/Linux and Mac as well.

Changelog:

2023-08-19 17:10:31 +0000 UTC View Post

Some achievements

Now I'm finally getting the last few issues of this release squared away (looking at you, Android), the next task I'm gonna be tackling is getting Light of my Life ready to go on Steam. One of the fun parts of Steam is achievements, a little token popping up telling you you did something special.

For a lot of "actual" games, this can be for stuff like killing this many crabs, jumping higher than X, running for X hours straight, but for VNs, it's more common to see it used to commemorate...

Update 0.7.2 for Android

Oh my gosh, Android releases are such a pain in the butt. Oh well.

Here's update 0.7.2, released for the Android version only. It addresses some om the problems reported with the game not getting past the load screen, and instability in the game.

I've tested it on my own Galaxy S9, that was having troubles with the previous builds too, and I was able to speed skip (for extra stress) over two of the heaviest scenes in Chapter 7 with this version without hiccups, so I'm fairly conf...

Chapter 7 update 0.7.1

A small update for chapter 7

• Reduce image cache size on desktops from 700 MB to 500 MB to help with crash reports for some users.
• Reduce image cache size on Android to 300 MB (ren'py default) to help with Android players who are able to run the game but are having stability issues.
• The above will probably not fix the issue some have reported about not getting past the load screen, that is still under investigation.
• Removed 32 bit support...
  2023-08-13 09:01:17 +0000 UTC View Post

Light of my Life Chapter 7 is out now

Chapter 7 - Kiss from a Rose is now available for everyone. Thank you everyone who supported the creation of this game, it couldn't have been made without you!

Version Ch 7 v0.7.0

• Adds chapter 7.
• Added about 10k images, bringing the grand total up to 23k2, for what that's worth.
• Reworked the gallery system. Now based on save files instead of stripp...
  2023-08-11 06:25:16 +0000 UTC View Post

Chapter 7 release date

Release date
Alright, the announcement everyone's been waiting on:

After more than 500 days, and 4k3 grueling hours, chapter 7 of Light of my Life is, finally, done.

It adds ~10k of new images, bringing the grand total up to 23k2 or thereabouts. It adds, I don't know, a lot of lines of dialog, okay. Plenty of innuendo, some will say too much, some will say not enough. Macy rolls her eyes a lot, Denise gives you that look, co-workers are up to stuff.

...

We need to talk about save game practices.

Since the public release is very soon to be upon us, here a short little rant about how to properly handle saves in Light of my Life, or any ren'py game for the matter.

Get that chip off my shoulder
Let me start of by saying I never really got why anyone'd want to get a random stranger's save game when starting a new chapter. Unless you care absolutely nothing about all the choices you made in the previous chapters (what are the pet names you are called or ...

Changes for signing up for the beta

Due to some pillocks petitioning to leak the beta, it'll no longer be available for anyone who's not already a supporter in good standing.

If you're not currently a supporter of standing, don't sign up in hopes to get into the beta.

Sorry about that, but the beta is not in a state to be ready to released to the public, and I'm not taking any chances.

Stuff that needs doing - a running blogpost (final update).

Right now, I'm getting a ton of questions fired my way about the impending release, and I imagine there's a lot of hand wringing and hopping from one foot to the other, and I find I'm writing a lot of similar answers, so I'm gonna try a little experiment.

I'm going to put up a little list of stuff that needs doing. It'll be spoiler free, as is, and not open for debate. It is not inclusive, and items may appear on or disappear from it on a whim, and it will be updated whenever I remember...

Content complete, so what happens how?

With chapter 7 all but content complete, it's time to talk a little about what comes next.

As you can see from the infographic I've been publishing, there's a few things on the bottom line that need to be filled out as well before we can release.

They are, from left to right, QA and fixes, a few rounds (probably 3) of beta releases and processing feedback, getting the android version prep...

Chapter 7: jumping to conclusions using iffy numbers

The other day, I promised you a little number crunchy, and as usual, I'll just be pulling some random numbers out of the current game build, and see if they tell us anything interesting. Note, a little while back I did a similar post, so I'll try not to cover too much of the same ground there, and just keep it short and simple.

As before, I'll be jumping my conclusions based on the only vaguel...

Where's the game at?

A bit of an update of the state of the game is long overdue, so here goes.

As you can see from the progress info (updated weekly on the pinned post here), I'm rapidly creeping up on, or maybe slowing racing towards, or, well, I'm slogging towards the end of content creation for Chapter 7. And about effing time too, I'd say. It's been such a long time in the making, and I really, really can't ...

Wall paper: Murder on the Orion Express

Is it true lady Brookington is nothing but a pretender of questionable lineage with scandalous appetites? Or is she a free spirit, misunderstood by a society where reputation means everything and impressions outweigh the truth? 

And what about her maid, Mrs. Gasket? Her loyalist routines are code-signed with the right certificates as is well and proper for a automaton in her position, but rumors have it she's hiding a dark past, and still mourns the husband she lost in...