Friday Update #23: Getting Wet (Patreon)

Based on the reactions to this outfit, I think this Friday Update's title might be a prediction for some of you...

These were just delivered to me from Myumi less than 3 hours ago. If you're in the game's highly active Discord server (invite here), you'll have seen me posting updates for art as I get them instead of only major updates like I did for this outfit over a week ago, but these are the final versions of Zoey's athletic one piece swimsuit sprite outfit.

I explained what this outfit was meant for last time, but as a refresher:

• This is not intended as a sexy piece of swimwear. It is meant to be an athletic woman’s swimsuit (that just happens to look sexy on Zoey).
• After jogging and gym exercise prove to be a bust for Zoey and Keisuke, the pair move onto trying swimming at the university's indoor pool. Keisuke provided the swimsuit, which he "appropriated" from the university's women's swim team's locker room (something he has access to as a member of the university's men's swim team). As it wasn't designed for a woman as curvaceous as Zoey "40-23-39/32H" Taylor, it doesn't quite fit her chest and hips.

The idea behind the multiple colors here (also seen on the post where I showed the art for the women's tracksuit and Keisuke's men's XL hoodie outfits) is that Zach can comment on his university logo color at some point with a short menu for the player to choose that color (think something like "I looked at the..." purple red anchor logo of my school.); alternatively, that menu can be skipped if Awkwardness is low enough since Zach wouldn't be absentmindedly staring around and commenting on the color of his school to himself (at which point it defaults to purple).

The purple is the color from University of Portland logo, the geographically location of the fictional Louis and Clark University that re:Dreamer largely takes place in; the red is same red of the uniform tie, but more saturated; and the pink is the "default" if the player never set the university's color manually or if Keisuke feels like messing with Zach by making him wear pink.

It took a lot of work with Myumi to get these outfits to where they are now (I still had to painstakingly edit the lower torsos on my end because Myumi was just slightly too inconsistent with them across the poses), but I truly think the results were worth it and speak for themselves.

Unfortunately, the water effects layer for the body doesn't work well with the nude outfits (I've been wanting this for over a year for the baths sex scene in Keisuke's route) because the shape of the breasts is slightly different when they're in the swimsuit, but Myumi should be able to make a version that works with the nude outfits without any issues.

I also made this white and blue edit that coincidentally turned into the same color scheme as my keyboard that I showed in Friday Update #20. As I said on my Twitter, "I don’t know how I feel about accidentally turning Zoey into my expensive custom mechanical keyboard, thereby condensing my Venn diagram of niche interests further into a perfect circle."

In non-art re:Dreamer news, the update is still being worked on with steady progress, but it's still taking a long time, even when I'm working on this game 6-8 hours a day, largely because I am still sick. I've been in a bit of a brain fog recently because my doctor gave me a strong inhalant steroid and cough suppressant for my bronchitis, and this medicine makes antsy and easily distracted. My doctor isn't entirely sure what I have, but a full round of antibiotics didn't put a dent in it. We're proceeding on the assumption that it's either viral in nature (it's not COVID-19 as I've been tested twice since having symptoms and had a clear negative result each time) or some gastrointestinal issue where stomach acid is getting into my larynx and causing me to cough endlessly. Either way, it is incredibly hard to focus on things when I go into coughing fits every 20 minutes or so that are so violent I have to spin my chair around and lurch forwards until my head stops spinning, and while this medication is holding back the worst of my coughing and letting me get more work done, it's shy of my usual productivity.

I just got the Stacker clone fully functional earlier today, minus the GUI, which still needs to be prettied up and simplified. Those values on the right are internal variables for when I was writing the code for it because I am bad at coding and need to see values in real time to tinker with stuff until it stops breaking.

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised how painless the code for this minigame turned out to be. It only took two days of work, and most of that was guaranteeing that it wouldn't break by playtesting the fuck out of it.

I've attached some demo videos, but Stacker is a rigged game designed to only make the major prize possible to win after a sufficiently large quantity of games have been won. After all, why would a game operator let someone win their expensive prize unless they knew they were making a profit first? On most versions of this game, they barely even try to hide it. If you use your phone to record the block as it moves around on the last row, it will literally skip over the only winnable position unless the payout threshold has been met (the skip is fast enough that the human eye easily mistakes it as not happening, but a camera video you can slowly advance removes this optical illusion). Only recently has the company behind these games realized that anyone with a phone can now prove that the house is playing with a deck overwhelmingly stacked in their favor, so they've started to make their rigging less transparent. Like claw machines, the new versions are visually imperceptible as being rigged, but if you hit the button on the right time when the payout threshold hasn't been met, the final block glides over the winning position and stops one block after.

Zach is a F2P gacha veteran and knows that the only wining move with rigged gambling to avoid playing, but Britney is convinced Zach is a sore loser who simply doesn't have the skills to win a fair game. Desperate to salvage his gamer cred with his girlfriend, Zach plays this unwinnable game to demonstrate how the game is rigged to make him lose.

Much like I just described, Zach pulls out his phone to start recording a video of the game in progress to give incontrovertible evidence to Britney that the game isn't fair. Of course, this requires getting to the topmost row of the game to see, and this Stacker clone isn't exactly free, either in the skill required to get to that row or the cost of each game ($1 which is roughly equivalent to 100 yen in the game world since it's easier to do the math for and I don't feel like spending the needless effort to project more accurate currency conversions in this fictional modern setting where Japan won a pyrrhic victory over America in a drawn-out WWII). If Zach, or rather, the player, can't make it to the top, he's going to look like a complete doofus, but Ai will eventually come to his rescue and hack the game to make it possible for him win. If he still can't win, Ai will make the game impossible to lose by the opposite principle of the other form of Stacker rigging only letting the button do anything when it results in a piece being placed perfectly; if certain C.H.E.A.T.S. conditions are met, Ai will add further insult to this by making the game not speed up over time.

The whole point of this is that getting a prize because you took a shortcut doesn't feel like a victory, which is a fact Ai will be sure to mention to Zach next time he bemoans that he can't just access the re:Dreamer player editor to change himself back into a man.

Snapping back to things that weren't thought out as well... I manually timestamped every notable part of Boney M.'s Rasputin because automatically generating the beatmaps for it had severe issues given the song's changing tempo and instrumentation.

This arduous 6 hour endeavor of pure data entry was much less hellish thanks to my numpad being on my left hand side of the keyboard, but I was so busy hyper-focusing on the task at hand that I never considered that it might be a bad idea to have this many notes...

It's quite frankly unplayable, but thankfully, this is the reverse of the situation with keyboard keyswitch lubing in that it's easier to take away material than it is to add it.

As you might be able to tell by this Friday Update falling apart with these tangents, I am dying of exhaustion. Restlessness is a common side effect of steroids, and I get maybe 4 hours of sleep each night now.

I'll keep hammering away at the update as much as fast as I can as much as I can, but I learned with the intro rewrites that it's better to do things in this game right than to do them fast and fix them later. I won't blame you (the person reading this) if you don't want to renew a membership to this Patreon next month, but I'm not just goofing off all day. I treat this like my job because it is.

Before I go, I'll leave you with the full-sized versions of the one piece swimsuit and some dry variants as attachments to this post.