Update - Shizu and Shuji cuddling (Patreon)

tl;dr - I've made actual programming progress this week!

This week's image

This particular image comes right after a string of animations of rumpy pumpy fun time. I'm currently waiting on the voice acting for this scene from Shiyon, the VA for Shizu. She's been unable to record recently, but I'm sure I'll have it soon. Actually, I'm waiting for stuff from all three of the active voice actors right now...

This week I actually did a bunch of work on some animations, but they weren't for this scene - those ones are already done. I was focussing on Nobuko over recent days, trying to both give her a nice new interstitial animation as well as a much larger sex animation. That animation is kind of based on the Iku anal sex animation in PAL, but I've (I think) significantly improved it for Timelapse. I'm still in the midst of rendering that one, but here's a frame from it:

Reworking the dating system

This week I've made a big change to how the dating system in Timelapse will work: previously, I had it designed as a scheduling session at the start of the day when all the ladies turn up to find out what the plan was, but then go about their usual daily business unless called upon. Now I've changed it so that they are simply hanging around Shuji's apartment through the day and as you move around the apartment you can either date the ladies or do other stuff (raise your skills, for example).

Here's an example of what it looks like in an early version:  https://youtu.be/VJNJm-8OIGo 

I'm excited about this change firstly because I think it's going to be simpler for me to program (that was what motivated me to make the change - the scheduling approach just wasn't working and it was driving me nuts), but also because it makes the gameplay clearer and more coherent, and it actually makes the writing (putting characters together for scenes where they interact) quite a bit easier.

Now, it does require a bit of story justification as to why the ladies are hanging around Shuji's apartment all the time, but frankly it's not all that far removed from the idea that they would turn up every morning for the scheduling anyway, so... I feel like I had to do the same work making it convincing anyway. Often my writing style is about taking something unbelievable and making it feel compelling, so I'll just take this as a writing challenge. That's much more in my wheelhouse than tackling a difficult programming challenge!

Optimisation

I've found that I can about halve the size of the jpg files I'm using without a noticeable loss in image quality, so going forward I'm going to be doing that with all the jpgs I add and I'll also over time be going back and reducing the file size of a lot of the ones I've put in already. This is important for several reasons:

1) Obviously it means you don't have to download as much, which is good.

2) I don't have to upload as much, which considering my poor Internet access is pretty great for me.

3) It means the game is less likely to hit the file size limit on online sites like Gamejolt and Newgrounds, and the game will load quicker on those sites too.

So over time I'll be working on that, but it's a bit of a tedious chore (I have to go into each file and re-save it in a slightly lower quality) so it's kind of something for me to work on when I've got nothing else I feel up to doing in the moment.

Stats screen

This is kind of a minor achievement, but I've done some other programming stuff including putting in a screen where you can look at your in-game stats, as you would have in PAL. Time of day, love, lust, skills, all that kind of thing. With my new-found passion for optimisation I've done it in a way that I think won't increase the file size of the game at all; at least for now. It's a pretty ugly, temporary screen but in the long term (particularly if the funding for the game picks up) then I'd like to commission a UI artist to improve the menus and such, including this stats screen.

In the process of doing this I've had to relegate the "auto" function out of the main set of buttons, which I picked because it seemed like the least essential. I ultimately don't think my games are really about "auto" mode anyway, so it seemed of low importance, but if you like it you can still find it in the menu screen.

Going into this week I felt kind of down about the challenges ahead of me, but I'm much more positive now. What do you think of how things are going? Let me know in the comments or on Discord!