Update - Twinkle toed Twyla (Patreon)

This week's image

Here's a picture that I made for Let Me Out, but which won't now be making it into the game. I'll explain more below, but this was going to be an ending in which Twyla made Lug believe she was a powerful witch and then had him tend to her like a servant. I thought I'd put a little foot-focus into that end for fans of that kind of thing. :)

Even if I'm cutting this ending, I thought you might enjoy seeing the picture. I might post a few more in the patrons-only channel on Discord if there's any interest in them. (If you are interested, let me know.)

Let Me Out v1.0.0 about to drop

As you probably noticed, Let Me Out stalled in development several months ago. This happened because: a) I didn't really have time to work on it any more with the pressure to get out substantial PAL releases, manage my holiday and finish the PAL expansion up; b) I was getting a little bored with it, since it was almost done and I felt I'd largely done all I needed to with the game; and c) there just wasn't enough interest in the project for me to justify putting in a lot of work on it.

That was a bit of a shame, because the game was pretty close to complete. I planned to add four more endings that I hadn't yet shown, but I only had one actually finished and the other three would have taken more work. Instead, what I've done was to tie up the loose ends by making all the remaining "paths" to an ending that didn't have a proper one link back to one of the existing endings in a way that makes sense, except, that is, for the one remaining one that I had actually finished - that one I've put into the game, and it includes five new pictures. That basically wraps it up, since the game was otherwise complete and even pretty well tested already.

When am I going to release this? Actually, it'll be posted about five minutes after this update goes up! It will be a patrons-only release, but only because it's hard for me to do public releases through Patreon right now. I will also be posting the links openly elsewhere, because this is the free v1.0.0 release and it was always intended to be public. I hope you like it; it's got 19 endings and if you've been waiting for the final version before you played it, it's also got a much more intricate and responsive gameplay style and way more content than LMI ever did.

All of this didn't actually take all that long to get ready, relatively speaking, so it wasn't the focus of my work this week. It just seemed like the most relevant thing to mention at the top of the update.

Pervert Action: Timelapse

Over the last week I've been working on the next stages of development of PAT. It's a little slow going right now because I've got to render and write a lot of things, while grappling with how it all works. It's exciting to get things working, but progress is coming along a little slower than I'd like.

My focus has been on two areas, primarily: firstly, the scene after the opening titles in which the main character wakes up and secondly the locations for the main 'dating' gameplay. The first, the scene, is important to get right because it largely establishes the plot. It's got to be an interesting scene, but it's not especially interactive so I don't want it to be too long or too much of a text dump; it's a writing challenge, while also requiring a bunch of different images to really give the moment by moment beats of the scene the kind of emotional impact they need.

The second part, the dating system, isn't something I've got to actually programming yet. In fact, I'm just hoping it's not too hard to do in the new engine. In Adrift I'd have no problem making it at all, it'd be easy, but in VNM I don't know; I'll have to learn whatever kind of variables the engine has available for me to use and how they're tracked, as well as how to set up a day/night cycle and everything... it's probably going to be a lot of work. At the moment I'm more in the stage of planning it and preparing some of the necessary images of the MC on dates with the main characters.

Eyeballing a new computer

I really need a new, much more powerful PC to improve my rendering times and make it possible to work with more demanding scenes. Without that I won't be able to do any animations for PAT and even making smaller scenes takes a really long time. There aren't really any quick renders in PAT and it's a more visual game, which means I need to make more. Even with a powerful machine I'm going to need to be using the tricks I've developed to keep things as fast as possible

I don't have the exact machine in mind yet, but I'm probably going to need to get a system with two GTX 1080ti graphics cards, as well as all the other necessary parts you'd expect built around a machine like that. If you know computers you'll know that's a very expensive investment, but it's just something I've got to do. The pain is that I actually don't quite know what I'll need, so it'll take some work to sort out the system. I also am going to have to transfer stuff over to the new computer and everything, which is a lot of work. I need to sort it out soon, though, because it'll just make a huge difference for me in developing PAT.

Did the LMO release catch you off-guard? Do you think I made the right decision with that? What do you think about the PAT developments and the new computer plans? Let me know in the comments!