(Yeah, I know that was terrible, but I had to do it...)
I just wanted to make a quick post to wish everyone a great Christmas/Holiday and to let you know that I need another day or two with the update. Family plans have made it extremely difficult to finish everything on time and I'm very sorry about that.
I've already said it on the discord, but I wanted to post it here as well: I honestly doubt that I'll need more than another day or two to finish everything, but if for whatever reason I don't start rolling out the update before Dec.31, I'll be halting the charges for January memberships.
I truly appreciate everyone's continued patience with everything! I know that every extra day I have to work on this, it becomes a little bit better, and I hope that will show when I finally get this update out to you all.
I suppose that I should start with the news that everyone is hoping for to save some people the effort of sifting through the report:
I HOPE TO START ROLLING THE UPDATE OUT TO PATRONS ON DEC 22 (FREE TO THE PUBLIC DEC 29) OR BY THE LATEST DEC 25 (FREE TO THE PUBLIC JAN 1). Frankly, it's dumb to try releasing a game update at this time of year, but I'm dumb, so it's on brand.
Anyway, on to the rest of the report:
I finally finished getting through with testing S3 this week. My apologies for taking so long with it, but between the size of the scene, all the varying paths and decisions, and more than a few dumb coding errors on my behalf, it was a mess to sift through everything. The remaining scenes are going to be a breeze to test by comparison and after that, I'll be nearly finished.
One of the only "big things" that I still want to do before release is to find some more music for the game. Some of these new scenes are in desperate need of some fresh vibes, but finding appropriate music can sometimes be difficult. I've (mostly) tried to keep the music in line with a fantasy-medieval-themed game, but if I'm being honest, as a music genre, the pickings are often pretty slim. I'm still going to spend the next couple of days flipping through as much music as I can find in the hopes of finding something that fits the mood I'm looking for.
But full disclosure, I may abandon those attempts for the time being and go with whatever songs I can find that match the moods I want for the scenes, regardless of whether they're themed appropriately! All I'm saying is, don't be surprised if you hear some guitar shredding until I can find something better to patch into an update.
Since it'll be Christmas for me and many others next week, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for their continued support throughout the past year. I don't like to overshare when it comes to my personal life, but suffice it to say that times are hard, and your support has been invaluable in keeping me on my feet. Even if all you do is like my reports, or post memes in the discord, I'm grateful to all of you! I hope everyone who's celebrating this time of year has an incredible holiday season, and to those who don't celebrate this time of year, I still hope you have an incredible couple of weeks!
I'm going to keep this report short since surprisingly there isn't too much to report. I was a little sick this weekend and spent a large portion of it sleeping, but thankfully I was able to use a lot of my nap times to render out all the pickups I needed to complete the scenes I'm testing.
As you can see from the numbers increasing almost all across the board, there's still plenty of work to be done as I run through testing everything. The good news is that apart from one 'non-romance' run, I'm pretty much done with testing on Scenes 3 and 4. For the most part, I just have a lot of spelling corrections and code testing to finish before moving on to the back-end stuff like updating the credits and menu screens, the non-romance run, and then doing one final casual run of the game to check for pacing, continuity errors and the like...
We're in the final stretch, and although I still hesitate to give a solid timeline yet, I think at this point I'm confident in saying that this update will start rolling out to Patreons within the next couple of weeks. I hope to have an exact date for you all by this time next week.
Hey homies, I've been working all morning on completing the scene that I spoke of in yesterday's progress report and I've come to a bit of a
Hey homies,
I've been working all morning on completing the scene that I spoke of in yesterday's progress report and I've come to a bit of a dilemma that I figured would be best solved by the patrons. So I'll try to detail the issue without spoiling much in the process.
Keep in mind:
-This is universal between both the 'straight' and 'variety' game styles.
-This is regarding a single decision, and will not be a regular occurrence!
-I'd like you all to answer this question with complete subjective honesty, regardless of my reasoning or opinions listed below.
If you had the choice between (sex style B) and (lesser alternative to sex), and you chose the alternative...
Would you be upset if that choice ended with some accidental (sex style B)?
EDIT for more context: the choice is between anal, and the alternative, grinding.
SECOND EDIT:Thanks for all the input, everyone! I pretty much knew I was going to have to make the new scene, but lack of sleep and laziness deluded me into thinking that maybe if the majority of people didn't mind then I could get away with doing a little less work lol. However, as many pointed out, if you choose to avoid something, having it forced on you is BS! So, no worries! no one will be forced into anything they don't want! Sorry that this poll angered some people into dropping their memberships, I was just testing the waters with a dumb idea and it will never happen again (I hope!). Leaving the poll up to run it's course for science.
Personally, as a player, I could see this potentially annoying me if it was about something I really just wasn't into. But also, the sex style in question is pretty standard these days, especially in AVN's, and as a dev, saving time by not having to render out another scene is also appealing.
Again, please answer honestly. Imagine this is just a general question about AVN's and not something specific to my game, and try to answer how you would honestly feel.
Thanks for the help homies! The poll ends tonight, so cast your votes quick!
It's been another busy week of development despite having a couple more setbacks.
I finished scene 5 and gleefully dove back into testing. Sadly, I quickly discovered that I messed up and forgot that I still had a couple of sections in Scene 3 that needed a fair amount of work. As you can imagine, with over 300 renders, there's a lot that happens during that part of the game with quite a lot of varying choices. Sometimes it's easy to overlook sections when there are so many variable scenes to keep track of.
Anyway, I finished one of the sections in question and the second section is next on my list. Once that section is finished, I should be able to wrap up testing on scene 3. Admittedly, testing on scene 3 will take quite a while, there's just so much to go over... But after that, it will be smooth sailing! I'll likely do a second pass over the new content once I've finished my first, just for a little more polish, and I still need to make a new title screen... and update the credits...
Regardless, things are looking really good on the overall development. I still hesitate to set a firm release date, but at this rate, I can't imagine it not being finished before the new year, and that's at the latest! Ideally, I'd like to get everything wrapped and released before Christmas, but again, if I set a date prematurely, something will happen and I'll miss it. I don't want to be one of those devs who makes promises and doesn't keep them, so it's better for everyone if I just wait until it's complete before I announce anything.
Hey homies, I'm going to keep it really simple for this poll: Do you want a SFW or NSFW teaser this week? I just don't have time to make
Hey homies,
I'm going to keep it really simple for this poll: Do you want a SFW or NSFW teaser this week? I just don't have time to make any new content right now so It's best to keep it simple.
Sorry for the lame poll... I look forward to going back to making more fun Patreon content once this update is finished.
This week had a few ups and downs but nothing too major so I'll go over them below. The main time suck this week was when I decided I wanted to update Ren'py for some reason. Ren'py is the engine that the game runs on, for any who don't know. Of course, this made some of my coding mess up, so I decided to quickly run through the game to see if I could find any more errors. This 'quick run' immediately turned into a full, in-depth playthrough trying to improve the overall quality of the earlier chapters. So, that was what I ended up spending most of my week doing.
On the bright side, there was almost no code that messed up and I'm MUCH happier with the earlier chapters now! I fixed A LOT of grammar, improved some dialogue, added more audio, and made as many other improvements as I could to what's already been released. Don't worry, I still had time to dive into the new content as well and fully tested the first 2 scenes. For the record though, a full playthrough would have happened eventually before release anyway. I'm a little OCD, so I wouldn't have released the new update without checking to see how the full experience was from the player's POV.
I'm going to make completing Chapter 4 my main priority this week. After that, it should be smooth sailing until the update is ready to go! I still don't have a firm release date in mind for the first half of chapter 4. Honestly, even if I did, I know that as soon as I set a date, everything will start going wrong, so for now, I'm just gonna keep on working and I'll probably let everyone know a week in advance when the update is going to be released.
Also, I'm sorry about the lack of Patreon rewards lately, but I'm terrible with my socials. I'm trying to get better and pay more attention to them, but it's an uphill struggle apparently. Still, that's no excuse to forget about what I've promised. So I'll be posting a poll early this week and another teaser (voted on in the aforementioned poll) on the weekend. It ain't much, but It's a start.
I was able to finish the last of the Scene 1 renders early last week and I'm happy to announce that I've officially entered the testing phase! It's both my favorite phase and the most stressful. I finally get to see all my hard work start to come together, but also, people start to get really anxious about the release so it feels like there's even more pressure. I guess I can't really blame anyone since it's been in development a lot longer than I originally thought and far longer than most people are willing to wait.
As you may have noticed, I've altered the progress report a little. Since I've had to remove the content from the second half of the chapter, it became a little difficult to track the numbers together, so I just split them up. It's more clear for all of you, and it's easier for me to keep track of... Big ol' W's all around! I hope... Leave your scathing reviews below if you disagree.
I won't get into all the specific problems of the testing phase, but suffice it to say, you get very familiar with the error screen, but it's just something that comes with the territory. I will tell you that coding is really damn hard sometimes, and if it wasn't for the friendly devs that I've been lucky enough to meet since I first launched my game, I'd probably still be bashing my head against my desk trying to release chapter 3! There are too many to list, but a huge shout-out to Veterans of the (?)AVN community(?) helping us Greenhorns fix our broken coding! Mad respect!
I had a pretty good dev week despite the not-so-massive numbers shown above. I'm mostly just in the assembly faze right now. Putting all the puzzle pieces in place to help figure out what pieces I'm missing. I'm still trying to crank out the Scene 5 renders, but since I want to start testing as soon as possible, I keep getting distracted trying to work on whatever holes I need to fill elsewhere.
All-in-all, it was a productive week and if I can wrap up everything I need for Scene 1 then maybe I can actually start testing this week! Fingers crossed.
I'm probably going to do another SFW teaser poll later this week unless I think of something more interesting before then.
For any who are concerned, my dad is feeling better. Sadly, I live a couple of towns away so it's not easy to keep tabs on him, but thankfully he's not alone. We've been calling/texting a lot more than usual and so far he seems to be improving!
Meera is tired of waiting for you to stop messing around with the Twins. Time is wasting and the two of you still have a score to settle!
Meera is tired of waiting for you to stop messing around with the Twins. Time is wasting and the two of you still have a score to settle.
Hey Homies,
Here's the teaser promised in the last poll.
It's a little weird going back to see these images, as I actually made them around 8 months ago, and I've made a few stylistic changes in my renders since then.
Oh well! The render quality in this chapter is going to be a little varied, but hopefully the story should remain solid!
It's not going to be a very long post this week as it's been a bit of a rough one for my fam.
My dad had a heart attack on Monday. Thankfully, he was with people at the time and made it to the hospital very quickly! After a bunch of tests and some surgery, the doctors said he has a weak heart but they weren't able to do much more for him at this time. He's a little weak, but he's back home now and he says he's "fine", but he's definitely not out of the woods just yet.
As you can imagine, it was a little hard to concentrate on the game's development this week. I spent most of my dev time running around in circles because my head just wasn't in the right space, although it's been easier since my dad made it back home. I'll try to make up for the lack of progress with both an SFW and an NSFW post this week. They'll most likely be teasers as I don't want to waste any potential dev time on creating anything that isn't directly related to the first half of chapter 4.
I guess that's all for this week. I wish I had more progress to report.
Miranda, Sabrina, and Abigail arrive at Sheila's house before leaving for a costume party. Who do you think should win for the best costume?
Miranda, Sabrina, and Abigail arrive at Sheila's house before leaving for a costume party. Who do you think should win for the best costume?
Hey Homies, Leave a comment to let me know who you think has the best costume.
Sheila is wearing some opulent ceremonial robes from Pyra. She's unaware of their true meaning or purpose, but they look fabulous on her! Miranda is dressed as a woodland fairy, or at least the way she imagines one would look based on old stories she's heard. Abigail was aiming for a simple house cat, but it ended up looking more like a leopard so she's rolling with a more 'ferocious' look. Sabrina made a great 'Zombie Bride' costume based on a character from the only horror book she's managed to read more than once.
(Full definition downloads in the attachments)
Hope you all have a fun and safe Halloween! Much love! JB
I've been under the weather this past week and I didn't get a lot of time to work on the game. However, I actually was way farther along in Scene 1 than I thought I was! I still need to organize everything into its proper place, but I'm actually nearly finished with Scene 1. So Yay! Also, even though I wasn't able to fully finish Scene 3, it's still only a handful of renders away from completion, so I'm not worried about it anymore. Well... the scene's coding may still need a lot of work once I'm able to start testing, but that's a problem for later.
In other news, the Halloween post will be out tomorrow. I spent most of my groggy weekend working on it between naps so I hope you all enjoy it in all it's 4k goodness.
Anyways, I'm still pretty out of it right now so I won't make this a long report, but I want you all to know that I'm still VERY HOPEFUL about the first half of the chapter releasing in December. Even at my currently reduced pace, I'm confident that I can wrap this half up in time.
Scene 3 is nearly complete. I decided to scale back on a couple of the animations, so I should only have another 15-20 renders to finish for it. I may still go back later to add more if I feel like the scene is a little light during testing, but for now, I'm going to consider the Scene 3 animations complete!
I should be able to move on to Scene 1 this week, and as (I think) I previously stated, Scene 1 has a lot of work finished on it already and it may very well be further along than I previously estimated. I haven't really had a chance to review it in a long time but I'll update everyone on that with the next report.
As for the Halloween Patreon poll, the winners this year are Miranda, Sabrina, and Abigail! They will either be getting individual posts or a group post at some point between now and the 31st. I haven't had the time to properly plan everything out but I'll have something posted on time!
I suppose that's all for this week. Hope you all have a good one.
Hey Homies, The Halloween poll is here! Better late than never, Right? It's a Battle Royale as all of the girls are duking it out for the
Hey Homies,
The Halloween poll is here! Better late than never, Right?
It's a Battle Royale as all of the girls are duking it out for the Halloween poll this year. The top 3 winners will all get a post together.
Please note: -The poll is up until Sunday at midnight. -Multiple choices are enabled (vote for as many people as you want)
Much love! JB
EDIT: I forgot to add Sheila to the poll and I can't add her now that the poll has started so I'll have to give her a special post sometime soon to make up for my transgression.
I swear, it feels like someone is stealing days from me because the weeks keep flying by!
Regardless, I had animations running nearly the entire week so I was able to knock out 3 with another rendering out right now. Everything's moving at a nice pace and it's looking like I'll need another 4-5 animations and some pickups to finish off this scene. It's more than I expected originally, but I added a fun option to one of the decisions and even though it's short enough that it's already scripted and coded, it'll need a handful of renders and an animation or two to bring it to life.
This might seem like bad news, but I promise, this is definitely good news! The end of this half of the chapter is in sight! To help put things in perspective for everyone. After Scene 3, Scene 1 should only have, at most, 4 more animations and hopefully only a handful of pickups. Scene 5 still needs some work, but it's the shortest scene in this half of the game, so I'm not too worried.
I still won't promise anything prematurely, but a December release for the first half of the chapter is looking pretty good right now. Anyway, I've been getting distracted typing this for the past hour so I'll wrap it up now.
It's been another busy work week but I was still able to get a fair amount of dev'n finished. I ran a few batches of renders throughout the week while at work and while I still need to sort them into the script, I think the only thing I have to finish for Scene 3 is the last chunk of animations. I'm still not exactly sure how many more I have left, but I imagine I have at least 3-4 more animations for this section of the scene to hit my bare-minimum.
Many of you are probably wondering why I dipped on the poll again this week. Frankly, I'm just getting a little overwhelmed with everything on my plate, so I'm going to take a little break from the chapter 3.5 renders. For the next few weeks, I'm going to post some spoilers/teasers as Patreon rewards to lighten my workload and to let me concentrate on getting the first half of this chapter finished ASAP.
I'm still going to try scattering some fun polls throughout the month as Halloween approaches. I want to plan out a string of polls for everyone to vote on what the holiday post will be. Hopefully, I'll have something figured out before the end of this week and you'll see the poll pop up, otherwise, I should at least have a plan for it by next Monday.
I should probably stop talking now. Hope you have a great week! Much love! JB
Miranda finds herself dreaming of a previous encounter with MC, except things go a little differently this time around.
Miranda finds herself dreaming of a previous encounter with MC, except things go a little differently this time around.
Hey, Homies! Sorry for the late post but I'm super burnt out. Also, I haven't had time to actually create Miranda's room yet so I skipped the 'dream bubble' aspect of Ariana's last NSFW post.
Anyways, I need to get back to work. Much love! JB
Apologies for missing the Patreon post last week, I was really busy and just didn't get a chance to work on it. That's the same reason I didn't do another poll. I didn't want to get backed up if I happen to have another crazy week. Sorry again, I'll be carrying over the post to this week.
Last week's issue was fixed thanks to some tips from a fellow dev and work on scene 3 continued. I was a good dev this week and made sure to have some render queues running while I was at work. So, with this week's batch of images, I should be nearly done with scene 3's images/script and then I only have a handful of animations left for that scene. This includes the section that I added back into the game a couple of weeks ago. I pray I can finish the majority of the scene's animations this week.
On a random note, before I fixed last week's technical issue, I went back and started working on a small addition to a scene from Chapter 2 that I've been wanting to work on. Nothing major, but I finished 7 renders for it and I only have a couple of animations before that small addition is finished as well. However, this is very low on my list of priorities and Chapter 4 content will always take precedence.
Also, I should mention that I'll likely be releasing this chapter in two parts.I didn't want to do it, but I really hate the thought of going over a year without an update, and we're quickly approaching the 10-month mark. Despite a majority of people being very supportive of my slow development process, I'm honestly starting to feel that my strict adherence to releasing full chapters is becoming more of a hindrance. I definitely prefer to release full chapters for the sake of the narrative, but with this chapter already being way too big, and with my life causing some major delays earlier this year, I feel it's fair to break the rule, at least this time.
Okay, I could keep wasting time typing but I'll leave it here for this week. Much love! JB
Well, it's been a rough week so I'll try to keep things simple and to the point.
Work kicked my ass this week, and chores/technical issues kicked my ass on Sunday. Thankfully I at least got one good day of work in on Saturday before the technical issues kicked in yesterday afternoon. I won't go into detail trying to explain the obscure issue here, mostly because I have no idea what the actual problem is. I only know that I'm unable to render in one of my Scene 3 sets anymore. It's literally the last set I need to finish Scene 3 so I'm going right back to looking for solutions after this report. Preferably a solution that doesn't involve me starting from scratch, but I'll do whatever needs to be done.
Thankfully, the issue doesn't seem to be affecting any scenes apart from the one in question, so work is far from being stalled! This is just a small and very unwelcome setback. Also, as expected, Miranda won the poll by a landslide. I'll be trying to get her post out ASAP.
That's all I can think of to report. Much love! JB
Maryn returns home in the middle of the night through some fairly strange means. I wonder where she was, and what news has her so troubled?
Maryn returns home in the middle of the night through some fairly strange means. I wonder where she was, and what news has her so troubled?
Hey, Homies.
Trying something new this week with a basic comic strip for the setup renders. So far I'm not a big fan, but I'm still completely wiped from my work week so this was definitely not my best work but I had to throw something together regardless. Sucks that it took nearly all day to get them done. I'm definitely going to make 4k/UHD renders much less often for these posts. They take too long and I already have very little time to spare.
Hope you all have a nice weekend. Short post because I need to get back to work.
Hey, Homies! Sorry that I couldn't get the Patreon post out on time but work kicked my ass this week. I'll be finishing it this morning and
Hey, Homies!
Sorry that I couldn't get the Patreon post out on time but work kicked my ass this week. I'll be finishing it this morning and will post it later on today.
For now, we're getting ready for next week's NSFW post. Honestly, given the new contestant, I don't know why I'm bothering with a poll. I think we all know who's going to pull the victory this time. But then, I've been wrong many times before so we'll see what happens.
Please note: -The names are in order. (Top to bottom names = Left to right images) -The poll is up until Monday afternoon (to make up for the late posting.) -Multiple choices are enabled.
Alright, now don't get mad at me... but I decided to put the scene that I cut last week back into the game. It turns out it was a little more important than I remembered it being. If only for the scene it sets up. It will still be scaled back from what I had originally wanted, but given the nature of the scene, there's only so much I can cut before it feels too short. I'm sure that once Chapter 4 is finished, most of you will appreciate that I added it back in. Sorry if I'm being too vague, but just trust me on this... If you like Gloria, you'll thank me later.
You may have noticed that some of the numbers are green this week. That's because I spent some time taking stock of all the completed assets and noticed a few images had been overlooked. These are either renders that I had somehow missed carrying over into the main game folder or renders that needed editing beforehand. No biggie, just wanted to point it out.
I was very productive on scripting this week. More than usual at least... When I went to delete the scene that was supposed to be cut, I gave it a read and ended up working on it quite a bit without realizing it. Mostly with the intent of moving it into a future chapter. But of course, after scripting and giving it a full review, I felt that it just wasn't going to work elsewhere. Also, it does set up the following scene which is already completed so I don't know how I feel about potentially having to remake renders.
Edit: Forgot about the poll. Maryn won! Post later this week. Followed by the Chapter 3.5 NSFW poll on Friday.
Before you say anything. No, I didn't make a mistake! The tiny twosome is back again for a part 2. Since I didn't have time to do more renders for last week's duo, I decided to throw them back up on the poll so they could have a chance to finish off their evening together. I had another render planned for them, but I just didn't have time to work on it.
Please note: -The names are in order. (Top to bottom names = Left to right images) -The poll is up all weekend. -Multiple choices are enabled.
It's been a while since these old friends have had any alone time together and they waste no time falling into some of their old habits.
It's been a while since these old friends have been alone together and they waste no time falling into some of their old habits.
Hey, Homies!
I didn't have time to get more renders done for this post, or to make it in 4k. I don't know exactly why, but my render times have gone through the roof recently and even this single lower-quality render took a couple hours. I may repost this at a later date with more renders included but sadly I can't promise anything because I have way too much to get done already.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy! The next poll will be posted later on today. Much love! JB
A lot of scripting was done since the last report as my computer was stuck running animations for most of the week. Unfortunately, I had to abandon one of my animations halfway through because of some glaring hair glitches. Thankfully, I was able to reposition the camera and move her hair around so it was only the 12+h of render time that was wasted and not the headache of the actual animating as well. Think my GPU is dying, but we'll have to wait and see.
With regards to Scene 3, I unfortunately had to cut a portion of this scene. I say "unfortunately" because it was going to be a lot of fun, but it wasn't exactly vital, and cutting it means that all of the heavy lifting for the scene will be finished after the animation I'm running right now. I still have some smaller sections of the scene to finish, but compared to what was cut/what's already finished, they're relatively small.
As for the poll, it went pretty much as I expected. Marigold/Abigail have won this week, so you can expect those renders a little closer to the weekend. The other contestants will be carried over to the next poll, as usual. Also, I haven't decided if the next poll with be SFW or NSFW yet. It's currently TBD.
That's all for this week. Stay safe everyone! Much love! JB
