AnimeCon Adaptation Dev Anniversary '24! (Patreon)

IMAGE HEAVY UPDATE. We're now starting in on our fifth year of game development! I know, I know—it's frustrating that we don't have a release out yet. Trust me, no one wants this ready to launch more than I do! Still there's a ton of important milestones to cover for the April 2023 to March 2024 period... so exactly what all DID get accomplished in the past year of work?

New Backdrop Illustrations:

 Basem finished a large number of backdrop paintings for us, and year four saw focus on new areas such as Emily's house, the city diner, and the convenience store, as well as quite a bit of attention to connective tissue illustrations such as different city streets. Special emphasis was also placed on panel and event rooms at the convention this time, focusing on entrances, seating, tables, and broad establishing views for multiple different rooms.

New Perk Icons:

Cute chibi icon designs that will play a role as themed perks to unlock that make gameplay easier or more fun. Each character will have their own unique perk tree that will affect the game regardless of POV. May also do a print run of these as either stickers or pins to mail out or keep handy at conventions!

• Brian Perk tree: improved dialogue options.

• Stephanie Perk tree: reduces and eliminates affinity penalties.

• Kelly Perk tree: lowers the affinity requirement for sexy scenes.

• Emily Perk tree: easier to find money and discover items.

• Rebecca Perk tree: lines of people no longer block access to areas.

• Chloe Perk tree: enables NIGHTMARE DIFFICULTY.

New Characters:

Prior to this past year, the ONLY side character we had a design for was Megan. This time we were able to have YeMcBear work on Ryan (Hipster Mister), Mrs. Rivera, the alleyway creeps, Sarah Star and her friends Qin Wanwan and Mega Mikuru, Mary and her brother Mark, Foxxy, Bill, and Jordyn. A wide supporting cast of characters is extremely necessary for the main story, as well as the secret story arcs!

New Main Cast Designs & Illustrations:

YeMcBear also spent a lot of time with the main cast! A full third of the work there was invested into rear view designs, which will allow us to better create the appearance of depth in scenes with the arrangement of the sprites in both foreground and background:

Even aside from cool mirror scenes, having rear view designs allows us a lot more freedom with positioning characters to 'face' each other while giving depth to a scene.

New Crowds:

We were also able to have YeMcBear work on one of these almost every month; populating the backdrop paintings with crowd layers is an important part of bringing the atmosphere of the convention to life with lots of people. As you can guess YeMcBear remains our artist MVP, finishing an order every single week for us.

New Animations:

This year we welcomed Goorie Art as our animator! He's great at matching YeMcBear's art style and has a real talent for making special scenes come alive in a way that's fluid, cute, and sexy. Having Goorie on hand to focus on animating the important scenes has helped free up YeMcBear from having to illustrate them; this allows her to spend more time on our cast of side characters and things like perk icons and backdrop crowd layers.

I can't understate how much this helps lessen the burden there; we need an honestly overwhelming amount of art for our game. Basem had a big lead on artwork progress since he has been painting for us from the very inception of the project; YeMcBear took over halfway through and had to catch up while replacing all of the Zaph character art assets we junked.

New Music:

Last but definitely not least, this was our best year with new Tenne tracks! TennesseeFlores produced over an hour and fourteen minutes of absolute banger tracks for us this past year, which will help to give each area its own distinctive vibe and each scene and character moment their unique special mood.

• 2:42 The Oppressed

• 2:01 Interstellar

• 3:31 Pizza Party Soda Funk

• 3:07 Primal

• 4:03 Brian's Theme

• 2:42 Classi Cafe

• 3:05 Brian & Stephanie Mix

• 4:13 Convention Exploration

• 3:12 Stolen Moment

• 3:20 Mixed Protagonists

• 1:55 Stephanie & Emily Mix

• 3:01 Life is a Giant Mess

• 3:31 In Flagrante Delicto

• 4:54 Night to Remember

• 3:49 Brian & Kelly Mix

• 3:14 Game of Cards

• 3:57 Sisters by Blood

• 4:45 Every Day, Every Night

• 4:30 Life is Beautiful

• 2:03 Burning Body

• 3:01 Monster Battlers Theme

• 3:27 Dilemma

Asset Recaps by Month:

I've been doing general recaps of the game development progress every four months to show off where we're focusing specific progress, this is the entire April 2023 to March 2024 tracking with each (non-audio) asset completion date:

All of the artists are working just about back to back on orders throughout each month, so progress has been incredible! As always I post regular updates in the dedicated discord channel for this project, and the patreon pages showing off each individual game area are kept up to date but may not notify patrons of new work, as I usually just edit them in to their respective pages.

When is the game coming out with a first release?!

I'm not sure! We are MUCH much closer to a first release than we were, and many of the early areas for the game are pretty solid. I think the deciding factor will be how far ahead we can get with the animations, as those are the most expensive to commission and time-consuming to create.

My ideal will be AT MINIMUM to have three different animations per spicy scene, and with three different spicy scenes per game release (counting both the plot of the story as published, and additional secret spice that comes about via player choice). To round out things with a third rule of threes, once we launch we want to be able to have the next release of game content be available every three months. So, the further ahead on everything we can get before first release, the better.