Hey there, nudies! Really busy but exciting week for us this week! We're now officially in our cutscene-building phase! Invertex and I have been hard at work building the intro of the game, and the big thing this week was going in and setting up camera angles. We ran into an issue with the cafe though, and what you're seeing in the above gif is this eventual solution we came up with. You see, originally, the cafe was placed at an awkward spot in the map.

This is how the cafe was originally placed in the map. At first, the placement made sense... but when it came time to set up the camera, it proved a lot more cumbersome than we thought. Everything in this map is visible and accessible from a single camera angle... everything except this cafe. To get inside the cafe, the camera would have to pretty violently whip around a full 180 degrees to show you inside of the cafe. If you've never heard of the 180 degree rule when it comes to cinematography, here's a quick little explanation from a great movie. We couldn't get a shot inside of the cafe without the camera cut feeling jarring and disorientating, and I spent almost this entire week in blender just trying to find this magical angle that would fix it... 

The solution? Don't rotate the camera. Rotate the cafe!

 

Instead of fighting the camera to make the transition work, it was easier to just rotate the entire cafe. And it looks so much better this way, too! It actually ended up fixing a lot of problems. It makes the cafe feel more open and inviting, and we were able to put some trees in to both help make the space feel cozier while also blocking out the end of map. And because of this, everything is now visible and accessible through one clean, tracking camera shot!

 

It can definitely be a pain to work in 3D, but in times like this, it's so nice to find a simple solution that fixes so many problems all at once. It also helped me get more acquainted with Blender! Invertex taught me how to edit geometry, so the actual rotating of the cafe and some of its model tweaks was done by yours truly! Invertex prettied it up even further with more props and foliage. It looks SO good now, I teared up a bit seeing it all in action. We actually have more HD footage, but we can't upload it here. Please check out our discord to see more!

One last thing - Work has begun on another one of the mall shops! This time it's the combination hair salon and tattoo parlor, Bubblegum Tombstone!

Once again, another store jam-packed full of love and details! Sweez has really been going all out on these. Don't worry, I help out on this too with colors. I can't imagine trying to color something like this all on your own... So many small details...

That's all for now, though! Back to cutscene-building! Thank you for your support, and see you next week!

Hey there, nudies! Hope you're getting some sun on those buns on this Easter Sunday! Apologies for the late post. I was up until 2:00 AM last night writing some MNL stuff and didn't quite want to get out of the zone. I'm definitely feeling it now, but I wrote some GOOD stuff. Totally worth it. More on that later in the post!

A lot of time was spent this week tweaking the sketchy comic outline effect you probably noticed in previous showings of in-game footage. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't big on the outline effect myself. I thought it was too jittery, too distracting. But Invertex insisted on finding a way to make it work, and I have to admit - I think he just may have done it! The above GIF is an example of the new outline effect in action. The sketchy animation is a lot more subtle now, adding just a little hint of shifting lineweight to the outline to accentuate that cel-shaded look.

Invertex also adjusted the outline color to be a better compliment Amber's skin-tone. Some highlights have also been added to Amber's body to make her flesh tones really pop. Between these two things, she really feels a lot more naked in a weird sorta way, y'know?

This above GIF had to be heavily compressed since I can't upload video here. If you want to see a more hi-def display in action, be sure to check out our Discord channel! I'll be posting a video demonstrating it just after this post goes up!

Sweez has also finished the Blaster Nation hobby shop interior! Check it out!

So much love was put into this one. Lots of Easter eggs too, which is fitting for the season. Can you name them all?! Probably not, since some of them are extremely esoteric. But if you can - wow! Please stop reading all of our private messages!

So as I mentioned at the top of the post, I spent a lot of time last night writing. Since we now have a new area and two more finished characters in the game, I thought it would be best to work them into the intro. The original intro to MNL was written very much with the idea that we wouldn't have a whole lot of assets to work with, and was very streamlined as a result. But with all these new finished assets, we've managed to expand the intro into something a lot more interesting. Before you go to the house and take off your clothes for the last time, Amber can walk around the starting point of the town and interact with some people, even doing a little odd job! It serves as a much better tutorial and introduction for the town, its characters, and Amber herself. And hopefully, we'll be able to show all of that off very soon~

That's all for now, though! Thank you so much for the support as always! Big month for us next month, so I hope to see you there!

Hey there, nudies! Bit of a slow week for us, as some of the team had their illnesses from last week carry over into this one. Everyone seems to be okay now and we're back on track, but we ended up falling a bit behind. I'll show you what we did manage to do, though!

What you're seeing above are some of Sweez's concepts for some of our Culo Culo Town pedestrians. Some of which you've seen before, but most are brand new! These are more generic characters who don't have much story going on compared to the main townspeople. The idea is that they have simpler designs that we can quickly edit and recolor to plop them around Culo Culo Town and make the world feel a bit livelier. Bear has already gone ahead and started modeling some of them, too! Though they seem to have forgotten their clothes.

Can you guess who they are?!

Speaking of 3D models, Bear has finished taking the new things he learned from the Amber model rework and has applied them to some of the older models.

Characters like Ferd here have a bit more detail, a more flexible rig for animations, and even apron physics! Hmm, we're gonna have to get Amber into a tiny apron at some point...

AT has also finished another batch of animations for us, but we're keeping most of them a special surprise for when you see them in-game. I will let you have this cheeky one, though.

Stuff we're working on for next week - improve pathfinding so that walking around Amber's house isn't a pain, figuring out some weird mesh errors, and rebuilding our save/load/quest functionality. Our cutscene building has been a bit delayed, but it's better to focus on the actual gameplay first and make sure this world is actually fun to walk around naked in.

That's all for now, though! See you next week!

Hey nudies! Sorry, but not much to show this week! By some weird cosmic coincidence, both me and Invertex managed to get taken out of commission for the majority of the week. Invertex got utterly destroyed by some food poisoning, while yours truly suffered some major back pain and was laid out on the couch all week. It SUCKED. But we both pulled through and we're ready to get back to work.

Bear, AT, and Sweez did manage to get some work done throughout the week while we were comatose, of course, but it's nothing quite ready for show. I will however, show this work-in-progress of the hobby shop from Sweez, though.

I'll be helping throw some colors on it, partially out of extreme guilt for asking Sweez to draw so many unique figurines with individual designs. We'll probably have this done by next update. We've also been reimporting our existing models into Godot now with their fancier new rigs, so that's fun. 

But that's all for this report! Sorry again for the small update. We should hopefully have a lot more to show for next week now that we're not sick and a lot of other little work has been completed. See you then!

Hey there, nudies! Whew, what a week it's been! I've actually been a bit sick and couch-ridden for the last few days, but I'm now on the mend and ready to show some really cool stuff! Including the above gif of some gameplay footage! We've got the dialogue system working, we've got interactable NPCs, we even have head-tracking so Amber's naked self can really turn some heads! We actually wanted to show this off last week, but Godot wasn't playing nice with some of Amber's animations. Got that fixed now, though!

We still have a bit of polish to go, including messing with the camera system, adjusting the sketch outlines on characters, and prettying up the UI a bit more. But man, it's been such a journey to get to this point, and I'm so happy that we got here. This is a pretty big milestone! Invertex certainly put in the work to put this all together, and what an incredible job he did! It's so good to see all of our combined work come together like this! This train now has some tracks we can actually SEE, BABBBYYYYY

I'll be posting a higher-res video on our Discord channel for supporters since I can't post video here. Along with polishing up the stuff I mentioned above, we'll also be begin building our demo cutscenes. I've had to go back and rewrite stuff to adhere to new code (and touch up dialogue once again because I can't help myself), but I don't think it will take much longer to have something tangible. We're not sure how far away it is, but there is definitely a light at the end of this tunnel. And a lot of train metaphors, apparently!

That's it for this week, though! Mostly because I'll throw up if I sit in my computer chair any longer. Thank you for the support, and see you next week!

Hey there, nudies! Sorry for the delayed post. Really, I'm not trying to make this a habit! We ended up running into some technical hurdles for a thing we REALLY wanted to show off tonight and hoped a little bit of extra time would be enough to fix it, but it didn't pan out. But that's okay, because we have plenty of other stuff to show instead! Buckle up, because this is a VERY image-heavy post.

So, as AT was working on some particularly spicy animations, we noticed that some of Amber's textures were warping in weird ways that looked very unpleasant. We decided to go back in and clean stuff up, and since we were already doing that, decided to go even further and give her one more upgrade to fix some remaining few issues that were bugging us. I proudly present AMBER 3.0. I think. I forget how many revisions we've actually done.

 

I actually helped in this particular endeavor with some textures edits! They're a bit more subtle, so let me point out the specific adjustments.

 

First - Nipples! Amber's original nipples had a drawn-on texture to add definition to her nipples, but the topography made it a bit... hexagonal. This is a fairly low poly game, but it was still something that bothered me. Bear dedicated a bit more polygons to that area now, and Amber's nipples can even get erect!

 

With that improvement, we realized we didn't really need the old hexagonal outline around the nipples anymore. I also wanted to make her areolas a bit more defined, as the gradient effect before felt a bit too... loose. I actually obsessed over these nipples for hours, trying to strike that perfect balance between stylistically cartoony but realistically defined. I'm pretty happy with the final result, though!

Next up - Crotch! I wasn't happy with the old pube texture and thought the super cartoony shape and outline was distracting. So I went in and drew a new one, dropping the outline entirely while adding a bit more volume and density to them. Her pubes should look like it'd be nice to brush through with your fingers, you know? Of course, I'm sure people still like her old fire pubes, so I still tried to keep the same basic idea. Just with more strands of pubic hair.

 

Bear also reworked the shadows and topography. Originally, her "vagina bones" as has been coined on the internet were painted-on textures, but now they're part of the same outline as the rest of her body. There's some other improvements to that area too, but we might have to go more into detail when AT has more animations to show... Still, looks pretty nice, right?

Finally - Butt! I think there were a bit TOO many freckles on her butt previously, so I wanted to reduce that down a bit. Bear's crotchwork ended up helping out with the butt as well, but I also snuck in something else there... Can you spot it?

 

It's BLUSH! Butt blush! Amber's got nice, warm cheeks now! Actually, if you look over some of the other screencaps, you can see she now has blush in various spots all over her body! On her chest, her elbows, knees, fingers, toes... and her BUTT! It gives her body a sense of warmth, doesn't it? It really helps with some lighting and shadows...

 

See what I mean? Isn't that just a butt you want to lay your head on? So warm and inviting...

 

Of course, she also has a bit of blush on her other cheeks now, too. She's really just too damn cute now. Can you tell I'm happy with these texture edits?

Whew... This blog post ended up being even bigger than I thought it'd be. We actually had even more to show, but I think I'll call it here and save them for the next progress report. I WILL, however, give you this gif of one of AT's new animations.

 

So squishy...

See you all next week!