Game Dev Progress April - July (Patreon)

Previous bulk updates: Apr 23 - July 23 | Aug 23 - Nov 23 | Dec 23 - Mar 24

Tons and tons of progress! We've had our character artist YeMcBear ramp up work on the bg crowd layers so that we can fill out some of those vacant panel and event room areas with attendees, and she has also been steadily working away at designs for our flashbacks and sidestories.

Our background illustrator Basem_S1 is going through Emily flashback areas one by one; April was Samantha's Jeep backdrops, May was Truliet classrooms, June saw a Truliet courtyard and hallway, and finally in July we returned to pad out the Rivera residence with additional backgrounds. Orders with Basem are starting to slow down, but only because lately in the past few months he has been swamped with orders from others on Fiverr—it seems like every other time I check he has three orders in his queue.

Goorie_Animation has been working on each consecutive game area starting from the beginning of the story, so that we don't have all animations clustered up just during certain scenes while having large swathes of the rest of the game feel lifeless. Sometimes, this means special secret scenes based on player choices like getting sloppy toppy from Emily in the very first chapter, or the introduction of a Megan story route. Other times, it means animating minor story beats like some of the many kisses, or even things like Stephanie bending over at the mirror.

TennesseeFlores has sent in some of her best work yet, with Summer Love and La La Life in April, and then a Megan theme and End of an Era in May. Since then however we have scaled orders with her way way back, as the project already has almost more music in it than players will be able to listen to. Rather than two tracks a month like we had been doing, we'll be doing one track every couple months going forward.

I want to say that frees up a good portion of the budget, but honestly all of that and more has instead been getting soaked up by animation costs. Animation is just very expensive! It will wind up being one of the most impressive aspects of the project though, and it is very nice being able to order animations continuously back to back rather than having to pace ourselves at just a few each month and have our animator idle or taking work for other projects instead.

 So, as always the visual novel adaptation here is a very resource heavy endeavor! VNs don't have to be, and you could even say that it's rare that they're not cutting every possible corner. But, AnimeCon Harem is my passion project, and I'm willing to keep this up even if it continues to eat half or more of my Patreon income each month. It will be worth it just knowing we made it into the best game we possibly could!