(art) update 41 (Patreon)

Hiya folks! It's (art) update time!

Before writing this update I absolutely wanted to finish a particular scene I've been working on for the last couple of days. I've pretty much finished 95% of it (and it's looking pretty nice imo) so I'm guessing that's good enough for me to drop you guys another one of these updates. I often have these little "deals" with myself to make sure I finish up certain things (or close to it) before starting something else. 

The scene I am working on currently is one of those which you will only get to see when you made the right choice in one of the earlier builds. 

We'll have at least one of those scenes (player choice dependent) in the upcoming build. One of them is pretty easy to unlock since the requirements for it can be fulfilled easily and are very close to the actual point of decision. You can miss it, but only if you pay zero attention to what's going on. 

The one I'm working on right now is going to be the result of an earlier choice as well and a lot harder to get. 

It merely means you'll get/got to see another scene though so it's not like we'll punish you for making a wrong choice.  Pick choice A and you get to see scene A and pick choice B and you get to see scene B. There's just some more time in between the choices and results so it won't be a simple matter of easily trying out all possibilities in the same menu.   

We don't really want to include too many of these for a pretty simple reason. Making scenes takes time and when we make too many of these (depending on choice) we'll cut the gameplay time in half for the players and double the workload for ourselves. Still, there needs to be at least a few of them to make sure some choices carry that extra bit of weight. We're making them very logical so you won't encounter situations which are totally disconnected from what you would expect. Making choices would become pretty meaningless if you don't at least have a vague notion of the possible consequences. 

The art for the next build is getting close to being finished. I pretty much sent all the material the coder will need his way already. Unfortunately some of those include temporary art. You might remember I don't like sending temporary art to the coder. It always makes me feel like I'm lagging behind and just ruins any good mood I got going. But sometimes there's just no way around it. The more time the coder has with the scene material to write them into the game the better!

I'm having fun doing some quick position sketches for possible future scenes(before I forget those), fixing some small mistakes in earlier drawings, putting together a new art asset update and turning that temp art into permanent art! I'm looking forward to start drawing some new scenes, but I better make sure I have all the stuff necessary for the upcoming build finished first. I also have to check up on a couple of bugs you guys mentioned. Especially the ones we thought were already fixed but for some reason pop up again(still?) are annoying. Luckily most of the problems are graphical glitches. Sometimes I'd love to just take a month and do nothing but look for bugs/glitches or whatever other problems might still be lurking under the surface.

Btw. We'll be aiming for a release of the early access version around the 14th of next month or earlier. We'd like to shave off a day or two to try and slowly claw our way back to an end of the month release eventually, but that's going to take time. 

The coder would like to return to an end of the month release asap and I really understand that sentiment but even during the best of circumstances there's always a few surprises which take more time than we initially thought, so simply sticking to a monthly cycle and maaaaybe release something a bit earlier would already be plenty good as far as I'm concerned. I mean, of course we can be a lot faster, but you'd be getting these kind of scenes.

Which is also very hot in an emaciated way? Heh, I'm sure this is someone's fetish. 

Anyway, the new build is slooowly on it's way to become what we'll expect to be a nice continuation of the current love route.  We have a couple of interesting ideas and some hopefully funny surprises. The new part of the maze is already pretty much done but there's still a lot to do before we have the new build ready. Luckily the 14th is still a comforting amount of days removed from us.  Although... these things are a lot like magnets...  once you pass a certainly threshold and move them close enough together they forcefully slam into eachother. That's how it usually goes with time and deadlines too in our experience!

Not much else to say, but I do like to revisit a short remark I made some time ago in a previous art update.

I'm currently using uncooked spaghetti as a replacement for my pen nibs. See pic below. 

What is this insanity you may wonder? Why aren't I using the normal plastic ones? Because there's a more natural feeling of friction when using this pasta based alternative. It feels slightly more like drawing on paper. 

Usually when people start drawing using a drawing tablet they're taken aback with how little friction there is, which feels really weird when you start out. It's something you can get used to eventually, but I've never really stopped looking for ways to get closer to that feeling of drawing on regular old paper and these pasta nibs work pretty well for me.

Now before anyone out there wants to try this themselves... there's a MAJOR risk to this. If for whatever reason the pasta nib breaks, there's no way of getting it out without demolishing the pen.  So if you plan on trying it out for yourself, make certain you're prepared for that possibility. I got myself a spare one(actually two spare ones) to make sure I can keep on working if that ever happens to me. 

That's all for now! Talk to ya later!