Update - Emi and Kumi in the sunset (Patreon)

This week's image

Ah, a relaxing sunset beside the pool... If you've played PAT 0.1 you might recognise these poses, but the lighting of the scene is very different in this shot.

Without going into great detail just yet, I'm planning for this scene to be interactive and you'll hopefully see it in a fairly early version of PAT, too. It is a hassle to render this scene, though - it's so demanding on my hardware that I had to divide the frame into four quarters and render them separately before pasting them together in Photoshop.

Holiday coming up - so much work to do!

I'll be having a holiday for a few weeks immediately after Christmas, but I want to make sure that I still have posts and game updates in December and January, so that means I've got a lot of work to do over the next few weeks! I'm preparing some posts to put up and I'm also working on things I can add to and improve for the next update of PAT.

It's a bit overwhelming because, of course, I had a rather busy November! I released the final version of PAL early in the month, then the first release of PAT in the later end. That's taken a lot out of me and I need a break, but I can't take it just yet because I've got to have stuff set up for a smooth return to work after I get back from the holiday, too.

What's in the next PAT update?

Likely the biggest feature update in the next PAT release will be voice acting. I've got Emi's VA already in there and Shizu's should be coming soon. I've also worked on the volume balance for Nobuko's lines a little bit - there's an engine bug that means the in-engine volume balancing I did for the first release didn't work, so I've gone in to edit the actual audio files to try and level things out some more. There are a few lines in 0.1 that are either too loud or not clearly audible over the music.

Because the game still needs a lot of the skeleton to be there before I can start adding more meat to the bones, I've been working on things like the dating system and basic functionality. Probably the dating system itself won't be ready by the next release, so expect that later. In the meantime, I'm trying to get the save/load system working right, as well as hopefully making it possible to save and load whenever you're just wandering around the apartment.

That kind of thing is not, I know, super fun because it isn't the kind of new content update that I prefer to make, but it's a necessary stage we're in right now that I have to go through before I can really give you guys a lot of stuff to enjoy.

Why do you think this image appears in a different lighting style in the PAT title sequence - do you care to speculate? Do added voice acting and fixes to things like saving and loading sound like good additions for the next update? Let me know in the comments!