Art(ish) update!

Art(ish) update!

Damn, I'm a bit behind of where I wanted to be by now content wise. I always had a sort of okay handle on how longs things would take me to finish, but I've slowly been increasing the content with each scene over time. Not that bad when everything goes exactly as you want it the first time, but not when you have a few bad days when you feel like you are drawing with your left foot (and aren't even left handed). I was basically working for a  couple of days on a simple animation, feeling "meh" about it and the next day I worked for only a couple of hours on another which surpassed the other easily... talk about being happy and annoyed at the same time  :\  !

I still find it fascinating what seems so natural to my right hand is a complete mystery to my left. 

But enough about that, I'm gonna talk a bit about our first book 4 build so if you haven't played it yet and want to know absolutely nothing about it, you've been warned.

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Our choice for the protagonist's "meatsuit" during the slave route is something we thought long and hard about, but Tenzin essentially provided us with a running start when it comes to setting things up. There's a lot of girls we can pick from and we don't like leaving girls behind which means we needed a point from where the player can get into women's panties quickly. 

With Tenzin, we had relatively easy access to Pema and Lin story-wise. Man, we had it easy with the whole hypno sessions thing during the slave route of book 3! 

Personally I've always liked Tenzin....  which is why we reward him by using his body for a joyride?!  Sorry Tenzin! 

Anyway, we have a shitload of ladies we'd like to put in scandalous situations. In fact, too many and certainly too many for one route and not turn it into a silly carousel of:

"who's next? Hurry, hurry! You're holding up the line!" 

Which is why we've decided to make the slave and love route very different from each other. If you're not particularly fond of body snatching Tenzin that might come as good news. It'll be different enough to the point where you won't see certain canon girls in one route and will in the other. We figured this is the only way we're going to do this and not take an ungodly amount of time to finish a route while still providing you with a fair amount of different girls from the cartoon. Not the perfect solution, but one which we think will work out best in the end. 

Back to the art, despite not going as fast as I want, I did finish a bunch of new scenes for the coder who has left me in charge of things while he's away visiting family and do a short recharge. He's a laptop guy so it's not like he's on a vacation. Let's just say it's a good thing he has that foil on his screen which severely limits the angle at which you can see the screen. Still, not the best circumstances for sure!

So yeah, I finished most of the art needed for the next build and the coder could in theory create a new build with what he has. So yay for that! Especially since we're back to our theoretical monthly-build schedule. I say theoretical, because try as we might, we did drop the ball on that for more than one occasion.  

Besides drawing I've also been doing some light bug tracking. There's always stragglers, ones who fell through the cracks earlier. I discovered an annoyingly elusive bug with the help of someone sending us a pm. Always makes me feel better when we can track down an older one(and sad it was there to begin with!) But I could never fault the coder. I'd go insane with stress if I'd have to do what he does.

I help the coder out a lot (with you guy's help) during the bughunt phase, but never get to see the ones he has to work his way through before we get a taste. Might be just me, but I'm usually pretty impressed with how he manages to keep things reasonably working.

And before I forget, my mom's biopsy came back clean so that was quite the relief. NOT having to worry about whether someone in your family has cancer does wonders for your concentration. Who'd have thought!

So although I started this post saying I was a bit behind content-wise, that's more of a thing I had planned on than which might become a problem. In fact, I've already started working on a scene planned for the one after the upcoming build! More as an on-the-side-thing, though.  Putting down some rough basics enable me to correct mistakes easier down the line. Whenever I start and finish a scene within a few days it's always a crapshoot whether I drew something too big/small or has another problem.

Things are progressing slow(ish) but well. We released the last early access version this month, so expect the next one next month.  Every day has once more become a precious gift of development time and that's how we treat it!  Talk to you all later!