Update - Hirai, Nobuko and Shuji

tl;dr - I've got this new Hirai/Nobuko/Shuji scene planned and a lot of work ahead of me to try and fix the broken migration of the game into the new VNM engine patch.

This week's images

These images are both from a new scene I've been working on over the last few days. The images have been gigapixel enhanced, so open them up for full quality. (That's why the files are so damn big.)

I wanted to add a little more to the next update in the way of actual interactive content and to kind of answer the question of whether there would be content involving Hirai other than the phone messages. Yes, there will, but I don't have definite answers on everything that will be yet; this is one specific case and I'll just be following my own inspiration to add whatever I think seems interesting at the time.

The second image (the kissing one) was one I intended initially to be animated, but when I opened up Daz Studio's animation timeline the keyframes already had a bunch of animations in there that were messing everything up. It would have been more work to fix the file and bring it back down to zero so I could start the animation than it would have been to animate it, so I skipped that and just rendered it as a still frame. 

It's an annoying bug(?) in the system that this happens sometimes and it's even more annoying that Daz updated the timeline in the software a while back to make it much harder to select and delete keyframes than it used to be. Since then it's become rather harder for me to make animations, but fortunately the most important animated sections of the game are already done, so that shouldn't be too big a deal, I think.

Updating to the next version of VNM

Visual Novel Maker has recently been patched by the company and I now realise that's because they were releasing RPG Maker MZ and wanted to do a company-wide sale on all their products. So they finally forced their beta patch into stable just so it'd be ready for new users after the sale and not because they'd fixed the problems with migrating resources.

On migrating the game to the new version I have, indeed, found that it's screwed up the game a bunch and now it's going to be a long, tedious process to go through and find what's missing and what I need to repair. Hopefully the repairs themselves should be no big effort on my part, but I'll have to play through basically every scene in the game all over again, so there's a lot of testing involved.

I could just roll back to the old version and I may have to, but there are some bug fixes in this version that I would appreciate bringing into the game. Therefore I'm going to give it a shot before programming the new scenes into the game, because I don't want to have to just roll back and lose the new stuff I programmed.

So anyway, I'll be honest that it's possible all this technical work ahead of me might delay the next update a bit. Sorry about that if it happens; I just don't know yet.

Do you like the look of this new scene? Think it's a shame that the kiss won't be animated? Let me know in the comments!