A few words for the new patrons, animations, and some other things... (Patreon)

Hello!

With the new update for Honeymoon Island - which was on hold while I finished other projects - new patrons have arrived, so I think it's good to explain more or less how my Patreon page works.

I always work on two games at the same time. I didn't like this idea before but I ended up adapting to it, and switching projects after an update turns out to be good because I come away with fresh ideas and new energy.

The downside of this method is that patrons interested in just one game can get a bit frustrated waiting while I work on the game they're not interested in.

In order not to frustrate anyone, I try to do updates every 2 months, so even if one of you is only interested in a single game, you'll still have relatively frequent content to download. Last year, I managed to offer 6 downloads to my patrons, all with significant content, and I intend to keep that up this year.

Now, this is an image of HS Tutor:

As you can see, the look is radically different from Honeymoon Island, but not only that, the theme, the tone, the characters, it's all quite different so I foresee a stronger division from now on. But I promise to work hard so that even those interested only in Honeymoon Island, or only in HS Tutor, don't feel frustrated waiting for more content.

About full animations in Honeymoon Island 

People who played my older games know that I make massive use of animation in the scenes. Each sex scene usually has 10+ animations at 60 frames per second, with different poses and angles. With time and experience, I've discovered tricks to make the animations more natural and interesting, but since I always aim for a large number of animations per update (60+), I try to keep things simple, without being a perfectionist or worrying too much if an animation is not quite right. In the end, I find the result acceptable, as can be seen in last year's Christmas special, which has some decent animations, some average ones, but in my opinion they all do their job: https://www.patreon.com/posts/game-download-95110063

In the case of Honeymoon Island, however, the rules are different. DAZ Studio, the program I use to render the scenes, is not focused on animation, so it only has the most basic tools. When it comes to human movement, things get pretty bad, and even super-successful games made in DAZ have animations where the humans look more like creepy animatronics from some amusement park where the maintenance guy is always drunk, than real people.

But there are solutions. What people do to get acceptable results is to import animations made elsewhere into DAZ Studio and just render them there. One solution for my case would be Blender. But I don't know how to use it, so I have to study the program first, then try the solutions for importing the models from DAZ, then create the animation, then export it to DAZ and pray that everything works, and finally wait about 8 hours while my RTX3090 reaches temperatures close to the surface of the sun while trying to render a single animation.

Is it worth it? Actually, yes, because a quality full animation is infinitely better than the shameful solution of alternating two frames, which is what I'm doing for now. But is it feasible? That's the big problem...

For example, the scene in chapter 20 of Honeymoon Island where the heroine performs oral sex on the protagonist took 8 hours of work. Note that I'm not counting the time as in the office, where you stop for coffee, to look at the hot secretary's ass, check emails, etc., it's 8 hours of actual work being done on the scenes. These 8 hours would not be enough to make a single animation from scratch for the game!

In other words, I don't think it's feasible to add full animations to Honeymoon Island at the moment, but I have everything here to start experimenting, and who knows, maybe if I can develop a method that works, I can start adding real animations to the game soon.

EDIT about animations: I found a program called Cascadeur that has good integration with DAZ Studio, a trial version to test the animation tools and the best thing: it's based on key frames, which is the same technique I use in my other games. I'm going to learn more about the program over the next few days and test the feasibility of creating Solvalley/HS Tutor-style animations for Honeymoon Island. More information on this soon...

HS Tutor

The next HS Tutor update is progressing extremely well.

I've already done the introduction of the school principal and all the logic needed for the player to explore the school during the missions she gives. Now I'm working on the first mission, which involves trying to get Zoe to agree not to be so controversial in her general views on human sexuality. During this mission, the player meets the girls in different places in the school and guess what? sexual things happen.

Oh, I haven't changed the principal's hair again, but I'm thinking of making her wear two hairstyles, one when she's at school, the other more casual, so I can please everyone, I think.

Solvalley

I still haven't forgotten this game (is it possible to forget such a bizarre game?). But I haven't started working on the free DLC yet, I want to focus 100% of my time on HS Tutor for the time being to release the update quickly, and then I'll start setting aside 1 hour a day to create the missing Solvalley scenes and maybe close the game altogether.

Honeymoon Island version 2.1

Some of you may have noticed that I've uploaded a 2.1 version of the game. I fixed some errors where a forbidden word that starts with "sis" and ends with "ter" appeared here and there in the text. I've also removed the option to remove the outlines from the fonts, because in the Android version, where there is no text box for the time being, the letters got confused with the background and if the user didn't realize that he could change the oulines in the preferences menu, he'd have a bad time. Now there are only three options for the thickness of the outlines.

Bye!