re:Dreamer Alpha 0.16.2

Click here for the download links (currently only open to Backer-tier patrons).

Hey, all, CaptainCaption here.

As you might have seen, my mental health has been kind of shot recently, so this release of re:Dreamer (0.16.2) is a bit thin on story content, even though I'd estimate I put in about 90 hours of work into it over 3 weeks, but a large part of that was art edits (both those in-game and not in-game):

Changelog:

• All four of the starting reactions to the secret Zach's mom tells him in The Mom Route™ have been written, with the latest one involving Zach and Samantha's relationship being put on thin ice. I do like the writing here, but my mental health struggles meant that this is the only new writing of the update...
• That major divergence point is now a distinct player choice, with access to some of those choices controlled by variables. The "partly cracked" and "partly repressed" paths are always open; to get the "fully cracked" path, you need therapy_answer not "Cis" and Trans stat greater than or equal to 4; to get the "fully repressed" path, you need therapy_answer not "Trans" and Trans stat less than or equal to 2. This hopefully gives people the extreme choice they want when they have stats in that direction while allowing nuance in how Zach (or Zoey) reacts to the news they get without having to change stats too much, even if it means I have to break a bit of my internal design document for how Z treats their gender.
• Samantha's sprites have been completely redone... and by that, I mean I realized I messed up the outlines of her face from how TiltSHIFT delivered them to me and made them too harsh compared to Zoey's (meaning the fixes now make them look even more similar, something I thought would be a huge issue but which turned out not to be), she got new expressions (mostly mouths, but I composited some of Zoey's more vibrant faces onto hers), she now has tops to her bottom parts of the outfits (allowing me to mix and match as I see fit and meaning she isn't wearing yoga pants for the Day 1 stuff anymore since she just got back from going out to lunch with her friend and has nicer slacks on), her file system got simplified and her file size shrunk (thanks to clever layering), her colors were made more consistent, and a dozen other smaller fixes I am forgetting. Let me know if you like her old outlines more than these, as I could make a variant with makeup from the old one as it had more noticeable lips. By the way, my OCD and ADHD were so off the rails during this development period that I had to redo the remake. All in all, I easily spent over 60 hours during 2 weeks doing this... and I am worried I messed up the expressions somewhere, be it the RegEx replacement, the layer effects, or what.
• A few of Zoey's outfits have gotten an overhaul to work better together without clipping issues, such as her white (really eggshell) turtleneck sweater (which now also has a whiter variant), her "Casual C" outfit, and all her jeans. Of special note is her Casual C outfit, as while it is not implemented in the game script, new versions where the text does not flip when pressing "Mirror Sprite" in the sprite viewer have been made. Of course, this begs the question why I am not making her wallet chain, zipper seam choker direction, sunglasses, shadows, hands, and so on not flip too. The answer is "I am not nearly that insane" as I am making a hard commit that the this extra work only applies to sprite parts with text focus, such as Molly's lanyard with her student ID visible, and hypothetically the student uniform badges down the line.
• The sprite viewer is now visible on the quick bar, and I gave it a ton of code overhaul to make it run more smoothly (but mostly to give myself key binds to quickly check expressions of each character; it's a dev-only feature as it breaks accessability features). This might breaks saves (some of my 0.16.1 ones broke, but others did not) so as a precaution, the entire route jump menu is unlocked. Let me know if you find it distracting, but I know it takes up too much space on Android, so it's not on the quick menu there.
  There is now a warning about the lack of incest to the mom route choice if you have content warnings enabled. I've also labeled all the bad ends the same way.
• bPoint gains are now labeled if you have content warnings enabled, since it's kind of the "give me spoilers" option?
• The naming scheme of Molly and Patrick's name box names has been simplified, making it a bit less convoluted to read them.
• I polished up some of the expressions in Britney's route (some after Britney comes over to Zach's dorm, and some after the Day 1 sex to the start of the changing). I wanted to do more because I really got in a groove with this, but I needed to focus on writing, not "brain turn off" tasks... that didn't quite happen, unfortunately.
• Fixed the sepia effect from the "flashback" near the start of Britney's route with the right clothes, and managed to make it work in-engine since the camera statement made it a lot easier than I expected.

As usual, the full changelog for every release can be found at https://justpaste.it/rdchangelog

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You've seen part of that art not in the the game already, with the hybrid Samantha/CaptainCaption sprites I can hopefully use as an Author's Notes expansion for the big 4th anniversary update in October:

Yup, I still feel like this.

But another part is another outfit for Molly, that being her red string bikini for a spring break trip:

It makes sense to get it done now, while Myumi still remembers her sprite file's layer organization.

See if you can spot all of the minute differences from me polishing up her art.

Speaking of editing art... Britney won the poll for the route I focus on for 0.17.0, which means I am going to have to edit the oodles of art for that yuri sex scene.

Seriously, that bed just looks awkward, but I can thankfully redraw that on my end (and pan and zoom the camera to obscure parts of it.

As art editing takes a while, this release might be delayed a week, but it will get done, and I hope you all look forward to it!