August (Rather, Belated July) Progress Update: Back on the Ball!

Hello everyone!
I hope you're all staying safe and healthy throughout everything 2020 has been throwing at us so far.

Managed to pick up the pace a little more in July, and we've got some pretty cool stuff in the works. Right now I'm working on polishing up and overhauling the first section of Amaryllis' episode. Anyone who played the initial test build of it way back when might remember my original title screen. I'd attempted to make it look kinda like the cover of an old school fairy tale book but it looks and feels a bit cheap, IMO: 

I took the same idea and applied it a little bit differently:

Made using a Unity Plugin called EndlessBook. Setting it up so the book flips open to different menu pages and such. Maybe a just a tad *too* flashy but I'm a lot happier with this and it sets up this whole 'fairy tale' framing pretty nicely.

That aside, I know people don't get games for fancy title screens, as you can see from the *first* image of the post, We're currently working on what's basically the last "major" scene of the game, which is the part where all the branching paths/endings split off. After this it's mostly a matter of finishing a few more sex scenes and maybe a couple more odds and ends if there's time. Still no ETA on the final release, but it's definitely on track for this year still, and I'm planning to apply for a Steam store page by the end of the month.

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Noire's content is starting to come together too.
As a preview, here's some initial pose concepts Chikki put together for one of the scenes.

Also got something in the works I'm fairly exited about. 

Look at how CUTE this is!

Still needs some tweaks on the colors/textures, but yeah that's 90% of the way there to being a chibified 3d Noire. This time around, we're planning to make some of the game locations places you can actually explore and walk around in real time! (We're still sticking to  'visual novel' style dialogue presentation and scenes. And all the lewd content is still going to be drawn 2d stuff) The 'style' of these exploration segments will basically be simple, low poly and cartoony, so it shouldn't really be any more system intensive than the pong mini-game in the last episode.

The original plan was honestly just to have a 2d clickable map, but in the process of recruiting someone to do some 2d chibi art for the map icons, I ended up meeting a 3d artist whom was willing to help us out with these. These are mostly going to be used in a 'walking simulator' sort of way, so don't expect combat or platforming (unless I get REALLY carried away with the playground at the park. Heh) but hopefully the end result will be something people enjoy.

All right, we've got a very busy month ahead of us so I hope we can keep the momentum going and I'll have even cooler stuff to show at the start of September.