Ch5 devblog 11/17/2024 (Patreon)

Hope you're having a fantastic Sunday!

This week I finished all of Haruka's dates and finished her story, bringing the grand total of finished and playable girls up to 5! Only 4 remain! That's 15 scenes with Haruka.

I wanted to make her a bit of a flirt, taking a bit more serum than she needs making her one of the bulkier 'daily serum' enjoyers.

As with every girl, I use the date scenes to provide a lot of additional backstory and depth for the girls while also playing into their development.

Haruka is someone who has become good at pretending to be happy. She of course needs to smile while at the job but perhaps there is some deeper reason in her past.

She of course only wears her work clothes at work, so I had to come up with a casual outfit for her and went with a simple green dress. (When doing fmg stuff, intricate clothes make growth art complicated!)

This means she has a total of 21 different sprites across 3 outfits. It's a lot.

Hoping Haruka will get more fans as this latest update drops!

Further, I made good progress on the next girl, Miyu!

Seeing is believing so I'll share one screenshot with some ambiguous dialogue.

With Haruka done, that leaves Miyu, Manami, Yuka and Naomi. If I manage 1.5 girls a week, we might be looking at 5 more weeks to pull everything together - assuming I don't lose my mind. This would make a 2024 release possible, landing likely around Christmas.

Sprite work is done for Manami, Yuka, and Miyu. Naomi will need a new set of casual and wrestling sprites - to go with the updated art.

Outsourcing:

To help make it a reality I hired a writer who has experience writing FMG stories to handle the next side story.

I will still do the coding and art but at least if someone takes care of the writing then I can focus 100% on the main game. Writing scenes is very energy demanding. Outsourcing the side stories for now seems to be a good bet.

This means that the Megumi side story is being worked on right now. We hashed out the story draft already. This one will be good.

I also outsourced some coding. Resident coder and gif lord Goblinounours revamped the chapter select screen! I needed a selection screen that didn't feel so cluttered and long to scroll through. I also needed a menu to select the side stories.

So Goblinounours came up with a 3 tab design -one for main story, one for girl dates, and one for the side stories.

When you unlock a side story you will get a pop-up like this. Then the story can be selected form the chapter select menu.

Another feature is the info box on the right side - this will give info for the scene as well as some details about when the autosave was made.

Currently the info box has placeholder text but this screenshot should give some indication of how it works.

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Phew that is another loaded week of progress.

Some words on the progress:

Last week, some members voiced their confusion as to why chapter 5 is taking long. In terms of game development - I believe we are super fast, but it might not be obvious just judging from the Sunday blog updates. I will try to break it down here:

Chapter 5 is looking to pack on another ~15 hours to the game - Assuming you are a lightening fast reader. It is likely going to take longer than that most people to get through all the content. 15 hours is a low low estimate. Could take most people more than 20 hours to enjoy all the content.

15 scenes per girl, means 9 x 15 = 135 scenes. This is not counting story scenes.

Each girl gets at least 2 sex scenes. Obviously FMG scenes though it varies how many depending on the girl.

Sprite and image count is a lot higher than chapter 4 as well, since each outfit for every character has 7 reaction sprites. (normal, grinning, thinking, surprised, sad, angry, blushing). This applies for many side characters too. Some characters have more than 7 reactions, such as a flexing sprite or pouting sprite.

Some other stats:

• The game has 7 vendors now, with 70+ items.

• Virgin route that unlocks new scenes in chapter 1.

• Side stories (likely to ship with 5 side stories assuming I release late December or early January)

• Updated UI / visuals

  • Choice selection ui,

  • vendor screens,

  • day/evening transitions,

  • chapter selection,

  • stat increase animation,

  • Gift giving animation + ui,

  • Date selection map screen

  • Girl reaction bounce and icon effect (already showcased in side stories)

  • Growth bounce and twitching effect (already showcased in side stories)

These are all things that have been done already, and has been shared in previous update blogs. Here is a screenshot of one of the vendors and the date selection map screen.

Final, final words:

Though I am aiming for a late December release, I will delay the game if I believe there are things that need to be polished.

What I can promise at the very least is a playable beta in December. Since there will be inevitable bugs and balancing issues. It is a gargantuan task for me as one person to playtest this game. (Plus I play with cheats so I have no idea what the normal experience is like at the moment! 😜 )