Hey everyone! First up, so I'm not teasing any of you: v0.35 isn't quite done yet. My weekend ended up being way busier than I expected. Once I was through with that there turned out to be a lot of loose ends that I need to get tied up for everything to function. I kept saying 'just one more thing', and completely ate up the time I should have been saving to get everything actually working.

The good news is that everything is (or at least should) be working now - all that's left is testing. Rather than rushing to try and make up the time, which always goes poorly in my experience, I'm going to set the public release for Friday/Saturday (48 hours from this post). I'll be spending the whole period between now and then testing and fixing up all the bugs or playability issues that I can find, so you can look forward to a smooth AVFH experience over the weekend!

Thank you for your patience! As a reward, here's a time-lapse for my recent bit of art!

Hey crew, I'm here to give a little progress update on v0.35 and to give a sneak peek at some of the new content. This marks three weeks since the last update; I had planned on having the build ready to go right about now. As usual, I've got a tiny bit more that I want to finish up first though, so I'll be releasing v0.35 next weekend. As way of apology, here's my recently finished practice art featuring my (virtual) boobs!

Let's do a quick recap of what I've worked on the last few days. First up was finishing off all of the Nerd's new late night event. The event involves some effects that only occur if he's at the same clickable at the end of the night. I didn't have any systems for that sort of behavior yet (outside of chores, which weren't quite right here). To fix that I updated the Clickable classes to support an end-of-turn effect if they're active/visible.

While looking at the Clickable code I also decided there was too much code duplication going on. The same code appearing in multiple similar classes can make things tricky to change and more bug prone. I took a couple of days refactoring that whole section of code into a much more streamlined inheritance structure which will be easier to debug and easier to build on top of. Overall things are looking much cleaner now.

Next, I did some work on the Caves of Grothnar location ('Caves of Grothnar' being the fake MMO that the MCILF can play to burn off stress) and turned it into a clickable map. That meant splitting up the existing events into a few different chunks, with some triggered on 'logging in', and some triggered by different map interactions. I still need to write a few more short interactions so everything has something going on.

And lastly, I've been working on some actual Caves of Grothnar mechanics! These are (and will remain) very simple: your character has gold, XP, and 'power'. There's a very basic inventory and equipment system, and equipment boosts your power score. Your chance to win an encounter is based on your power vs. the monsters power, plus a random die roll. If you win you get to collect some gold, XP, and loot. Lose and you get booted out of the game. This sets the stage for future events where you can use 'advanced persuasion techniques' to get gold and loot from The Nerd give you gold or loot, or lose to monsters and find out exactly how much Caves of Grothnar simulates!

As part of the loot and equipment system I'm adding some trinkets which will be displayed as part of the MCILF's model. Here's a look at the first (and currently only) one:

These trinkets will mostly be an excuse to give your character some silly accessories, like huge fantasy piercings or plated boob armour.

For this next week I'm going to be adding in the rest of the Cave of Grothnar encounters, then I'll be focusing on bug hunting so we're ready for a weekend release! I may squeeze in a poll for what other CoG accessories to add if I've got extra drawing time, so stay tuned <3

Hey crew, I thought I should check in and give an update on what I've been working on for the last few days!

Something that has bugged me (and plenty of players, based on the comments I get about it) is the inconsistent window placement for the main house in AVFH. From the upstairs hallway it's implied that the order of rooms is: MCILF,  Nerd, Firebrand, Slacker. From the backyard, however, there are only two actual windows visible, and the far left one is used as the trigger for the Nerd's events - Something's gotta be wrong there!

The answer to why is simple: On the earliest versions of the clickable maps I didn't know where the bedrooms were going to be. For the backyard ,my only concern was making sure the house had a house-vibe. Upstairs, I had intended to have the MCILF's bedroom door be behind the camera (reducing the window paradox by 1) with some 'turn around' clickable like the principal's office has. I found that to be really unintuitive, though, so her room was moved.

So I wanted to fix that. "I'll just draw some extra windows" I thought, expecting to spend 20 minutes getting this done before shifting focus to writing.

Once I got to work, though, I felt like I needed to put in a little more effort. Some of the perspective in the scene was janky (but not as bad as it is upstairs; more on that in the future), so I fixed that up. I took some extra time to make the new windows nicely modular so I could update them in the future. The cleanly drawn windows looked jarring against the rough house art, so I improved that. One by one I started redrawing (almost) everything!


New backyard art spoilers below!

In the end I think I'm very happy I took the time to get this done. The perspective drawing tools in Clip Studio were super useful for these highly geometric scenes, and the whole space feels sooooo much more polished now. There's still going to be another art quality pass in the distant future, but all of this is useable art and not a clunky placeholder asset.

Next up, I think I'm going to keep the art detour going and redraw the upstairs hallway - the perspective of that hallway is massively wrong. Until I fix that, anything I draw for that space will need to be redrawn and it won't be useful for visualizing where things go in general. That's a much less complicated area, so I don't expect to take nearly as long - hopefully I'll have an update for you in a couple of days!

Hey all, I'm back with another update on work for v0.33!

For the last few days I've been focused on clickable art, particularly the new bedroom clickables that I'm using for the upcoming night time events. Since drawing characters takes me a good chunk of time (even with the rough style I'm currently using) I decided I should improve their bed art as well, rather than have to redraw everything in the future. That involved fixing their perspective, getting the scale right, and giving them some rough shading. I also cleaned up some other clickable objects, like the Nerd's computer, while I was looking at the files for them.

I've just finished the last bit of sleeping art (the Cheerleader; who had the most pose detail AND the most awkward perspective), which means I've now got 100% of the art for v0.33 finished! I've got all of the basic triggers set up for the night time events too, so all that remains is to write the actual dialogue and narration. That always takes longer than I expect, so rather than tempt fate I'm just going to say it'll be done Soon-ish™.

Besides my direct work on AVFH I've spent some time working on art-related stuff. I've long been frustrated with the amount of time I need to spend going from a mostly-finished sketch to clean lineart that I can colour and shade. I went searching for a mechanical solution to produce clear vector lines - which would save me hours of tedious retracing time and let me polish up a lot of my practice drawings so I can share them. I actually experimented with a machine learning method first (more on that another day, when I've got more time to write and make some example images), but the approach that seems to be working actually goes back to my old favourite open source drawing program: GIMP!

The G'MIC library of plugins had some very useful filters that pretty reliably (and faithfully) converted my rough sketch into a cleaner raster image. From there I could take it into Inkscape (also open source!) and vectorize it, but I think the clean raster version will be plenty for what I need it for. Here's an eample:

The final result would still take some light cleanup, but it's much easier to work with than rough lineart from my sketch. The bits that need the most cleanup - the hair, in this example - are also the bits that are the least clear in my original sketch, which feels correct. Hopefully I'll be able to put this all to work in the near future!

Alright, that's enough writing from me, I'm going to go get started with some writing!