Progress Report (Patreon)

Howdy Ho! Here’s what’s up:

I’m done with Katya’s art and I already edited the face in all her events. I’d edit her body too, but I don’t know what she will look like yet - that’s up for the polls to decide.

Editing her body after the polls shouldn’t take much time, because she doesn’t have any layers yet (unlike Kira), plus I edited her face rather fast and I don’t think the body edit would be that different.

On top of that, Moana went through an extremely tedious task of manually replacing every individual line of dialogue Katya says in the entire game to change her artwork from a single picture to multiple. Which means that Katya’s art now works just like Kira’s - she supports body mods and outfit changes (we can now make her breasts/lips bigger etc.)

While working on Katya, I had a couple of new ideas which led to the upcoming release having two more H-events that repurpose the art we already used:

- I already finished editing the art for a repeatable scissoring H-event with Katya, I just need to make a proper “dorm” background which is what I’m doing right now and it’s good to go.

- The second one will be a surprise. But it will be available on a specific route, have a bunch of possibilities, multiple partners and it will also potentially award you a new T-shirt. I will provide a short guide for it in a separate text file to keep it spoiler free and we will include a “cheat” to switch routes like we did in our past two releases.

I’d tell you more, but I don’t want to spoil the fun.

I already wrote the text changes to accommodate my new ideas. And while those H-events weren’t in our original plans, this is what usually happens when I start drawing.

The work on the main quest itself (Shwift dialogues, prison pole H-event) is also going smoothly - Moana is coding in the text and I started drawing the event, but had to switch to work on Katya more.

A bit of a context - I write and draw for the game, which sometimes gets kinda tiresome and is definitely more time consuming (especially switching between “writing” and “drawing” modes), but there are benefits to this. The art looks exactly like I imagine it and I can edit both text and pics whenever I have new ideas.

That’s exactly what happened here, and it’s times like this that make me appreciate being both the head writer and artist at the same time - Katya's new art inspired me to create two more H-events and a t-shirt, which is great in my opinion. The t-shirt is a part of a joke, so I can’t really show it, but I think you’ll like it.

Now, both new extra H-events reuse art, which is a necessary sacrifice to ensure that the release will come out faster and the game won’t stagnate. But I think we figure out how to make the “art reuse” both more fun and acceptable.

There’s basically two big problems with art reuse:

- It comes of as lazy

- It can make all important story content seem less significant.

Example: Imagine you have already seen some H-scene with a random hobo and then you witness the exact artwork with a different partner at the end of a significant main quest. That would ruin the scene, I imagine.

So, here’s our solution to both problems:

Kira will “learn” new scenes and poses in important quests, and that will unlock reusable H-scenes with other partners.

Now this isn’t just “art reuse”, it’s a full blown game mechanic that will encourage you to complete side quests and explore the city.

The upcoming version will have an H-event like that - scissorings with Katya. The conditions are simple:

You have to complete the first half of “A Modest Proposal” (talk to Gulag) and regardless of both your choices in the quest and the path you’re on, repeatable scissoring becomes unlocked and added to the roster of repeatable Katya events. Oh, and you have to be “dating” her of course.

If the conditions are met, Katya will approach you and the H-event will trigger, then she will either randomly harass you or you will be able to ask her to “scissor it out” yourself whenever you want.

This scissoring scene will have a different background and partner, but it will use the exact same Kira pose, which is why we’re able to make it so fast - there’s no need to layer Kira, which saves us 90% of time.

However this “learning” method of unlocking repeatable events is not universal, it just can’t be applied to every situation, and that’s where our second re-used H-event comes into play:

This H-event reuses one of repeatable random Vivarium artworks, and Vivarium events all have unique art. In terms of “plot”, this event is more important, so it should logically be the one that comes first and unlocks the Vivarium event.

But, that particular Vivarium event happens to be equally as important in its own way, because it sets up some Vivarium stuff. So, there really is no way to determine a “master” event in this case, both of them are needed and are valid.

Which is why there has to be something “extra” to make up for the re-used art - and we’ve decided to provide you with more customization options in cases like this (a t-shirt, for this particular event).

That’s pretty much it, from now on we’ll start reusing art either via the “learning” method or with extra customization options offered as a reward. Reused events will of course have different text, different background, different partners and different details to spice things up.

I also solemnly swear not to abuse this and continue to create original poses for Kira - I encourage you to tell me if I ever break this promise and I will go back to draw something new.

That’s all I had to report for today.

This is a creative process, so changes are bound to happen, all in all I think the extra content will result in a better game. I sincerely hope you all won’t mind that we’ll reuse art on occasion, especially now that we have a rather interesting way of doing so.

The work on the upcoming version is going smoothly, but I can’t yet see the end of a tunnel. There's still a lot of things to write, code and draw before this version will become playable. That said, two extra events are layered and if we decide not to layer the pole, we will be able to upload this version much faster, we’re just not yet sure whether or not we should do so or finish layering the entire thing before release.

Here’s the links to the current polls (in case you missed the notifications):

Katya breast size poll (click me) 

Katya body-mods poll (click me) 

As for which options won the previous polls - it’s “vibrant blue” hair and “normal” body type.

And now I’d like to wish you all a Jolly Christmas! I wish you all prosperity, stability, success and good health! I sincerely hope you all had a good year and I wish for the next one to be substantially better!

Thank you all for your patience and support, the end is near!