Dev Diary #32: Progress Update July

What happened last month? Let me tell you!

We're still working hard on Mayu's Date and with that, Date Mode in general. Early in July, we gave out the first prototype to our Patrons with Beta Access. It featured roughly the first chunk of the Date and pretty much all core features, but no animations, graphics, sounds etc. whatsoever. Since then, writing has finally been finished, the further level design is well underway and I have started to make it visually appealing ;)

I started with a proper animated dialogue box like in the X-Mode Demo and adjusted it to handle multiple choices, a skip button that jumps to the next choice and a dialogue history in case you want to know what you've missed if you skipped ahead ;)

I also added a smoothly following camera to the date board as well as a standardized way to set and read variables in order to make the player decisions matter more.

I'm also almost done with developing a system that handles the different variations of the girl's portraits during Date Mode since - because of story events - we needed to add two additional stages to Mayu's portrait, which we also posted. We can now predefine certain portrait stages in our internal level editor and they will then be dynamically assembled to avoid the need to have a separate image for each and every combination of clothing, accessories and facial expression. It also makes for nice portrait transitions :) I'll make an extra patron-post explaining this a bit more, soon.

Speaking of Mayu, she got her cinema date background as well as a poll on which of the book cafe background sketches will be used, which will be the final background for her date.

Last but not least, Cucu has finished the design for the Wheel of Fortune/Wheel of Misfortune events that can occur throughout the dates and which I will shortly put in.

Paralelly, we ran a poll to determine the background story of our patron-designed girl with the working title "Polly". She'll be a video game character that somehow ends up in the real world. At the moment, we're excited to see whether she will end up being a teen, a young adult or a MILF.

And very last but not very least, after Patreon somehow caused a massive amount of patrons to get their credit card transactions rejected or even marked as fraud, we decided to go forward with another small interactive animation release we planned in order to further shorten the remaining wait for the Date Mode Demo and to make sure we don't lose too much time earning money otherwise. Our patrons already picked which character and artwork they want to see and we already decided on a good array of little extras, so expect something soon :)

That's it for now, there's a light at the end of the tunnel, so bare with us!

Have a GREAT sunday!

x

Zanzo