Dev Update 20th November. Part 1 (Patreon)

Hi folks,

I know it's a day late: Patreon wouldn't save my draft, so I had to re-do this whole fucking post.  (The irony of re-doing a post about the re-do is not lost on me.)  Anyway, here are some details on the re-do.

As mentioned before the Season 1 re-do will cover episodes 1-10. If you have any suggestions of stuff that you would like to see changed in episodes 1-10 (stuff that you didn't like in the original), please let me know. I'm not going to cater to every whim, but your suggestion might be something I agree with (but just didn't think of), so feel free to get your suggestions into the comments below.

So, what are we changing?  Artwork, script, gameplay and GUI/interface. And also adding music and sound fx.  In order of complexity / amount of time needed, (from least to most) these are:

Gameplay: Not really changing much here as I don't want to veer too much from the original style / gameplay.  I am NOT introducing free-roaming or any stat-grinding mini-games.   I will give more options to say "Not interested" to certain characters (especially early in the game) and then they will get the message and stop chasing you. I know some of the earlier episodes suffered with a few bunny-boiler moments where women you may not have been interested in, still kept throwing themselves at you.  I'll also be removing some dialog options that didn't reaally impact the scene / character / outcome. There won't be many getting removed, so there will still be a LOT of dialog options / choices.  Just a handful which seemed (on further scrutiny) redundant filler. I am also removing the two different stats for each girl (Relationship and Lust) and just making a single relationship stat.  There were too many blurred lines between the two and the distinction / usage of BOTH was never really needed. And in later episodes, I ended up merging them into a single score anyway.  So, with only one stat per girl, it will just make things a little easier to keep track of.  And as part of the GUI / scoreboard improvements, I'll provide more frequent checkpoints where you can check scores/ status.

GUI: Changing stuff like the main menu, updating the gallery/scene selector, stats screen, etc. And I'm also planning on adding a character bio page (so you can review what you know about each character, likes/dislikes and current relationship status). Not much progress on this so far, but that's something that needs to wait until the end.

Music & SFX? Pretty self-explanatory.  Haven't done much on this yet as I need to figure out costings / licenses, etc. as I don't want to use anything without permission.  Will need to do  bit of research on this.  There are many different options for each piece of music (buy a one-off license, subscribe to subscription services and get access to many songs, commission unique music, etc.). Once I make some progress on this, I'll let you know.

Script: Lots of tweaks / improvements / edits to scenes.  Adjusting some choices, making some characters a little bit less "desperate" / needy but nothing significant. All of the girls' characters / personalities will still remain the exact same, but will make some changes to align more with their characters. For some of the side-girls who were originally introduced as one-and-done characters but who ended up growing on us and being fleshed out, their original scenes might have come across as more generic, so some tweaks may be needed to align them with their actual personalities (only minor stuff - nothing too noticeable).  Will also give you a few extra scenes to get to know some of these girls a little better and also some options to keep in touch (when the main plotline keeps you apart from them for too long). This will especially help with any solo-girl play-throughs where you are focusing on a specific girl (or a small number of girls).

The vast majority of scenes will play out very similarly to the original, but there will be edits / extensions to flesh things out a little (and to supplement the extra artwork that we are adding).

Where possible, I'm also going to try to add a little extra scope to say no to stuff / skip certain scenes if you're not interested to try to make things a little more immersive with a better sense of freedom.  But there will still be a lot of "mandatory" scenes as there's no way we can make it open-world and certain things HAVE to happen for the plot to progress.

Artwork: We are re-doing every single piece of art and adding a lot of animations.  The artwork isn't just a one-for-one upgrade where we end up with the same amount of (improved) images as the original. Each scene will have more (in some cases a lot more) images.  Basically, when I first started the game, my rendering time (machine time) was 90+ minutes per image.  Now we have it down to an average of 10 - 30 mins, so we can squeeze in a lot more images.  And animations that would have taken me a week back in the day (hence we didn't have any) can be done in 8-12 hours. In addition to Cell and I working on art, we have also sub-contracted a lot of animations to a third-party animator, so this will also help with the upgrade.  Now some samples of the evolution of our art. Taking this image as an example (one of the very first images I ever created). This was from the opening scene where Monica greets  MC at the door:

Our new version will look this:

Just to step you through what type of things make a difference (and what we've learned/improved on over the past few years).  The new image has a completely new house asset, a slightly upgraded Monica (pretty much the same one we introduced around episode 18).  And I know she looks a LOT different, but only a part of that is the new model. The lighting, render settings, pose/expressions and post-work all have an effect. For anyone interested in the technicalities / more details in what each of these mean, I'll make another post soon that goes into a little more detail (This post is already getting too long to keep some people's attention and I've only shown one new image, so far. :) Just to illustrate the effect some of these items can have...

This is the original Monica in the new location / new lighting, using our new render settings. (Same old awkward expression).

This is still the original Monica with the same settings as above - We just added the new dress and mirrored (somewhat) the new pose. The poses don't transfer over exactly between old models and new models (there is a script that improves, but didn't bother using it as this is just for display purposes). and the new dress isn't a perfect fit on the old model (see the clipping in the breast area).

And a slightly improved pose.  This is still the original Monica (just in the improved settings / location/lighting).  Anyway, this is just to illustrate that most of the improvements aren't due to model upgrades... there is a lot more involved and the models only received minor tweaks. (Just to re-iterate... the re-do models are the same as the models used since episode 17 or 18 - Nobody got a re-do specific upgrade, with one exception - Zarah got some new eyes - See below...).

And even when we added in the new Monica / new lighting/ new settings and everything else and thought we had it right... We ended up going through quite a few iterations to get it where we wanted it (or at least in our opinion... good enough to move on.).   As mentioned in my previous post, this meant multiple iterations of re-do and we recently ended up re-doing (again) a lot of our re-dos from the earlier episodes....  That's a lot of re-dos in one sentence! :)

So we went through images like this...

and this....

ended up at a final destination that looks like this:

Others that didn't make it were:

It's a hugging scene but the shadows killed it.

and this:

We somehow shrank her boobs accidentally. And this one...

where we messed up our camera focus...

And some that DID make it are these...

And this churn are all examples from just the first SIX images of the game. So, hopefully that gives an indication of the time required (and why Cell and I don't have a life)  But don't worry, we are way past 6 images finalized.  :)  We have a good chunk of the basics for the first 9 episodes already squared away.  But plenty of tweaks and re-dos needed in addition to some brand new stuff and a lot of animations.

This isn't a proper animation (we keep that for the sex stuff :) ) but just a sample of a mini-animation we made for the first "hello" kiss with Monica: (Youtube link)  Re-do Monica kiss

And a quick intro video for Katie: Vid1 1 K Intro

These aren't meant to be anything special... just a bit of fun to add a bit of flair to the opening scenes. (Didn't take much time, so please no hate-mail on why we're wasting time on shitty videos like this.)

As mentioned above, Zarah did get some new eyes (no mean comments about her getting a new face and a new body too - :) :) )  Although I think her newer model was a vast improvement....

Episode 1:

Episode 24

But even with the upgrade, her eyes still bothered me. I felt they were too black. Any Jaws fans will get this quote: "Y'know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes." And I could never get it out of my head whenever I looked at new Zarah over the last few episodes. So after completing all of our Zarah content for the re-do... including animations, I made the unpopular (with Cell) decision to give her new eyes and re-do everything. So this (from the re-do)...

Became this...

We also re-did the lighting seeing as we were re-doing anyway.

And this... (episode 1 of the re-do)

Became this

OK... enough rambling (more rambling to come soon in future posts). But straight after this, I'm gonna post more samples...  I just had to cut the length of this post as I think it's what's causing the issue with Patreon not letting me submit...

That's enough... for now... Please add any questions or comments below or DM me and I'll get back to everyone.

Thanks,

CG