Dev Update 25/07/2020 (Patreon)

Update time!

Let's start with the good news, Phoenix is back to work! She's already completed one of the commissions that were left unfinished before she gave birth. And I'm now figuring out the next set of commissions for her. I'm still hunting for a background artist to help speed things along.

Despite still taking July easy, I did manage to get some writing time in. I think I've managed to strike a good balance between character, exposition, fun and sexyness in the first date with ballet girl. It's close to done now (excluding editing and implementation) and I really like how it turned out so far. What's left to do write the small bit of branching dialogue that, like in Bell Master, will reward you with a nice sexy image if you've been paying attention to how each girl likes being talked with. 

A pitfall common with this kind of mechanic is where, because each girl likes different approaches, the player ends up presenting a different "face" to each girl, making them seem manipulative or disingenuous. That's not an approach to romance I like to promote, so I'm taking extra precautions and in essence limiting the range of response options available to the player to what I believe would be reasonable for the main character to say given previous response options. Keeping them as honest as I can while still providing a range for player expression. This is an interesting balancing act and I'm sure I'll fuck it up more than once, but it's one I think even just attempting to achieve would improve the resulting game. I'm curious, how do you all feel about this issue? Is it something you've given any thought to? Let me know.

There is one more slow week left in July. I'm getting on top of the life distractions that required this to be a slow month. So I expect August and onwards to return to a normal game workload.

Have a great week!