MNL Progress Report #56 (Patreon)

Hey there, nudies! Things have been going really well this week! We finished yet another demo-related story illustration! We're actually almost done with all of them as far as the demo is concerned. We have maybe 3 more to go, and then everything beyond that will be for the main game. Very exciting! Check out this serene picture of Amber just floating on the water. What the heck are those things next to her? Quick, grab them and throw them far away!

We're also happy to announce that Amber's model rework is DONE! AT has already applied our original animation rig to Amber's new model, and things MOSTLY work... but unfortunately, there will need to be significant tweaks to the animations to account for Amber's new proportions. Many of the old animations have her arms clip through her boobs, or default to something weird. You can see it a bit in action with the couple animations that aren't too terrifying.

(TL;DR: NOT FINAL ANIMATIONS)

So, in a previous post, I talked a bit before about potentially creating a new, more capable rig for Amber's model, with the downside that it would take roughly a month to redo the animations for it. Since we will need to tweak Amber's animations on this current rig regardless, we've decided that it would be better to just go ahead and redo them for the new rig. This new rig will give us better control of Amber and allow for much easier control as well as more expressive... expressions. While AT gets to work redoing the animations, Invertex and I will be working with the old model, rig, and animations to continue building. Once AT is done, we can then just upload the new stuff and swap them out with little issue. I don't foresee this delaying the project much at all, as we still have a good bit of cutscenes to build. I think with us working parallel like this, it should line up nicely.

Meanwhile, Bear has gone back to the cafe/park area to fill it out more. We want to include it in the demo, but we noticed some missing geometry in the camera angles we were hoping to use. Bear has gone back to fill out the place more, and my GOD, it's really starting to look like a little town to explore!

And because we've gone ahead and started working on the outdoor mall area previously, we can include it in the backdrop of this area!

It's not the whole mall model, just a lower poly, flatter version. Once you cross the bridge, you load into the proper mall area. This isn't an open world game by any means! But still, being able to see other parts of the town just makes it feel so much more real, like an actual space you're walking around butt-naked in.

And while all this is going, I'm still plugging away at reformatting our story scripts to work with Godot's dialogue system. And because I just can't help myself, I'm using the opportunity to tweak the story juuust a bit more. Thanks to Sweez's amazing panels, our cutscenes can be SO much more involved and give Amber many more opportunities to be her adorable naked self. The undressing scene in particular is SO much better now because Sweez's insert panels allowed me to rewrite the scene in a much more fun way. I really can't wait to show you more, and hopefully that'll be sooner rather than later. No definite deadline just yet, but we're doing as much as we can to get this demo to you soon!

That's all for now, though. See you next week!