Update - Emi on a rooftop (Patreon)

tl;dr - The game's getting close to playable and I've put in a jealousy system! You jelly?

This week's image

So I'm just going to straight up admit that for the image preview this week I have no idea what I've shown before and what I haven't. I'm pretty sure I put this one on Discord, but I don't think I put it on here. It's also an image that doesn't necessarily actually relate to a real scene in the game, because this is just an idea I tried out.

For the last few weeks I haven't actually been working on images that much, so I don't really have any new lewdness to show you right now! I have some stuff I haven't shown before, but it's too spoilery.

Jealousy

When testing the game the other day I felt that the gameplay wasn't really complex or interesting enough, so I decided to go ahead and try adding a new element that I'd been thinking about for a while: jealousy. It was potentially disruptive to what I was doing so I wasn't sure if it was a good idea, but in the end I was able to conceive of a way to fit it smoothly into the game design and then over the course of probably only about two days I had it all set up and running well.

Now each lady has a jealousy score that will build up each time you do anything with your time besides dating her. Once it hits a certain limit she'll get into an argument with one of the other characters and Shuji will have to mediate, losing time overall.

While I can't say too much about prospective features for the game in future, I imagine I can probably use a stat like "jealousy" for other aspects of the gameplay that will be introduced later on.

Getting close to a real game!

I'm really glad I took this extra time for expanding the core gameplay over this month without focusing on a release. It was definitely the right decision from the perspective of making the game actually what it should be, and the spine of the gameplay is starting to feel more and more complete! I don't think it's really far from being ready to play, except that you need actual content to play for in there, of course. ;)

That said, adding content is kind of the easy part. That's partly why I spent so long working on PAL, to be honest; it was just always kind of easy to see how to add a few more scenes here and there, or maybe some little extra secrets to further expand the game. It still takes time, naturally, but when it's in that kind of position I can just follow my creative instincts and add whatever feels right in the moment. I'm very happy that we're getting close to a point with Timelapse when I can actually settle into that kind of rhythm.

A lot of what I've been doing this week is running through the game and gradually expanding, testing and fixing aspects of the main game design to make it as complete and interesting as possible. I think I've fixed the save game problem, too!

Does jealousy sound like a good gameplay mechanic to you? Let me know in the comments!