Update - Nobuko on the counter top (Patreon)

tl;dr - I'm happy that I can work fast on a lot of stuff now, even if the programming is taking me a long time. There's a video link below of some progress, if you're interested!

This week's image

I think this pose turned out quite nicely, although I haven't been quite sure whether I should share this particular moment just yet... oh, well, I guess this is the moment for it. :) I can say, at least, that in the actual game this is an interactive screen, so there's moving hotspots you can click on.

It's very much a custom pose that I designed and it's particularly nice when I get an image in my head of what I want and then I'm able to make it work well. Here's the big version:

Work speed

Considering the pace of things recently you might be surprised to hear that I actually think I'm now producing content for Timelapse very quickly - about as quickly as I was able to produce it for PAL by the end, even despite the higher production values and less familiar engine.

My new PC makes image production much faster and the new engine is quite easy to work with for simple scenes (much harder for complex stuff, but that's to be expected), so when I've got an idea for a scene I can write it up, make a few pictures and program it in quite promptly, so once the game has its gameplay spine in place then it will be easy to produce large amounts of character content for it.

Getting those gameplay systems in place is the hard part. If that were the only technical pressure on me right now I probably would be okay tackling it, but because there have been a bunch of other issues with setting up production on the game (transferring to the new PC, trying to upgrade the character models, fixing engine bugs, etc.) it's been hard for me to focus much on the programming challenge of designing the gameplay.

Now, all that said, if you're worried about the progress then in the long term I'd say you shouldn't be - I've been able to produce quite a bit of material lately that I just can't put into updates right now. The earlier stages of PAL development were like this too; I was making a lot of stuff that I just couldn't use yet, so development seemed to crawl a bit before I finally was able to make big leaps forward and release lots of content in big updates. I am trying to put out bonus content too, (so long as it doesn't take too long to make) just to make sure you're taken care of.

I'd be lying, of course, if I said the process wasn't frustrating to me (particularly this programming challenge) but I'm heartened by the fact that, as I said above, the amount of time now between having an idea and getting that to be a fully realised scene is pretty low. And the scenes are really starting to look and feel pretty much like what I picture in my mind, which I couldn't say in PAL for a long time. I was making a scene for the latest release the other day and when I looked at the images I thought they were okay, but not quite what I was trying to do. It really didn't take long, however, to redo them to match what I was going for and not just accept the compromise.

Anyway, while I'm talking about the work I'm doing, here's a little video of what I've been working on for the dating system:

https://youtu.be/1KwKnsoFy8U 

What do you think of how the dating system is turning out? Do you think the picture turned out well? Got any opinions about my work flow? Let me know in the comments!