Update 48 (Patreon)

Today's image

Iku's Valentine's gift to you! Actually, I honestly don't know if I'll be using the love hearts in this image, I think they look a little silly. I was trying out an idea with this pic based on what you commonly see in hentai art with hearts all around a girl to indicate she's enjoying sex. I will ultimately use the image, though, as I think it's a pretty good blowjob pic.

I'm always hesitant to show anything quite this explicit in an update; I ask myself, 'am I showing too much? I want there to be plenty of unseen stuff left in the game when they play it.' Then on the other hand I tell myself, 'but they deserve an explicit pic every now and then.' Ultimately I still have heaps of stuff left in reserve that you haven't seen (threesome scenes, for example) so it shouldn't be a problem anyway.

Worked on the Ai/Rio threesome scene

I set out this week to work on the Ai/Rio threesome scene, thinking that this would be a sensible thing to knock over for the next alpha. I still plan to finish this, but I only got part-way through the work I started. I did make good progress, however, and I don't think it will take too much effort to polish it off. I think it needs maybe four more pictures, plus some sound editing and a little bit of programming and testing, but the framework of the scene is now actually built in and should be mostly done. It's almost all written, recorded and implemented, there's just those other things left to do.

I did get derailed on this, of course, when I realised I'd been planning to release a demo...

Working on the demo

I'll be fairly open here about my thinking and my reasons for doing it this way. I have mentioned in past that I was considering making an early access demo of PAL to help spread the word a little and generate some interest. I'm certain that people who release public alphas/betas or demos get a lot of extra attention that way. While it's a bit of a hassle to make a demo, the upside is that mostly working on the demo contributes to working on the full game anyway, so it's not like I'm losing much time for development. (Maybe a few hours, but that's about it.)

So this will be a public demo, freely available to all and sundry. It will NOT be the full alpha of the game - in fact there are going to be some strict limitations on it. The demo will only have one main sex scene (the Fumi scene) and will also only have Fumi's relationship scenes; none for the other girls. (Although there is a bit of sex stuff at the beginning of the game that is also included.) Furthermore, while the full game's plot runs up to day 21 with events on almost every day and many new gameplay features introduced over time, the demo will only include up to day 7. It will include the combat system, but the maids won't get all that powerful by day 7.

I had a bit of concern that $10+ patrons might feel a bit ripped off if I released more than this and I don't really like publicly sharing works in progress anyway, but I think this scale of demo might be a good compromise. There will be a few small things in the demo that aren't in alpha 0.7.0, but nothing all that substantial and it will all be in alpha 0.8.0 (whenever that comes out) so there's not a lot of reason to get excited if you've got alpha access, I'm afraid. Also, if you're one of the players who is intending to wait until the full game comes out before playing then I'd advise leaving this demo alone. It cuts off early in the story, but I appreciate you guys who want to see the final, complete work and this is not that.

In order to get the demo ready I've been rounding out Fumi's story and sex scene a little, as well as the early parts of the plot. That's meant designing some complex pictures that I hadn't tackled yet, and redoing a couple that I had made but weren't all that great. Also I have finally included a unique sex response in the Fumi sex scene that I've never included before (you'll have to track that down for yourself).

I chose Fumi as the focus of the demo because:

a) I think people will like the sex scene, (people who've played it will know what I mean) but I think mostly she's not the first character that players are drawn to. So after playing and hopefully enjoying Fumi's content they will hopefully be even more interested in discovering what the other characters have to offer.

b) Fumi's stuff is mostly done already - I think it's the most complete.

c) She's a maid, which means her story is one of the main ones and uses all the gameplay features.

I think the demo is mostly ready now - I just need to run through it to test it out and probably rebalance a couple of things. If anyone's interested in doing a quick beta test to let me know if it's running fine, that would be helpful!

Do you have any thoughts about the hearts in the picture above? Or about the demo? Or anything else? If so, please leave them in the comments below!