(Hehehe, I'm so punny)

Hey crew, it's been a little while so I thought I'd give you a progress update on v0.37 of A Very Full House!

For the last couple of weeks I've been bouncing between a bunch of different sections of AVFH, tidying up things here and there but (in retrospect) not achieving much. I reflected on that for a bit, and decided that was a symptom of there being so many "good enough" placeholder pieces of content. Any time I started to work on something I'd run into something else that wasn't quite finished, meaning my new content would need to be updated or rewritten in the near future - a thought that really puts a damper on productivity!

I decided to tackle that "oops all placeholder" feedback loop by working on something that was absolutely going to be in the final game: better location art! I started with MCILF's bedroom, since that's a location you see for a bunch of the game. As a reminder, here's what that location looks like in v0.36.6:

The first thing that jumped out at me was the lack of shadows for. The sewing table was the biggest offender; without any shadows on the wall or floor it looked very disconnected, almost as if it was floating or drawn in a different perspective. Casting shadows onto other objects needed an update to how room objects were drawn, as well extra shadow assets for each object. This was exactly the sort of catch-22 that was holding me up!

I pressed on, updating the clickable code to have optional shadow images (coding always takes less time than I expect) and adding shadows for each object where they should be casting them (drawing always takes more time than I expect!). With that side project actually finished I was able to go back and update all of the clickable art in the room, bringing the whole thing up to a more uniform standard that looks significantly better! Of course I'm going to be biased, so I'll let you be the judge:

Now that the room art is more put together I can start working on new content in the bedroom without worrying I'll have to redo it in a month or two. It also means I now have a shadow system which I can expand to all of the art for other locations! That's going to be my next focus: updating all of the house art to give it a more consistent quality.

Last up for today, I forgot to post an update here with my latest bit of practice art: Madison's PR campaign! You can leave a like and retweet over on Twitter if you want to encourage me to do more, or just enjoy her big bubble butt right here:

That's all for today! I'll keep you posted on v0.37 progress as I chug along!

Hey everyone! Sorry for the long gap between update posts - more on that in a bit. If you're ever anxious or worried about me (I've gotten some lovely check-in messages! ❤️) I'm usually hanging around on the Discord and give less formal updates as I'm working on stuff.

So, what have I been working on? Writing the Jock's new night time scene has been my focus, I'm happy to say that it's now fully coded and written. The main scene is something like 5000 words (it's 5800 words with code; I'm eyeballing the proportion) primarily split between two sex options. Those two options both have three major variations of their own, and then a bunch of cumshot decisions as appropriate. Now I'm doing all the integration stuff to fit the event into the game, along with some much shorter interactions that lead into or come after it.

I had hoped to have this writing bit done two weeks ago, but my brain decided to turn to mush and refused to engage with anything creative. This 'wall' fades over time, and it fades faster if I can get something productive done. To help make that happen I took a little detour to an easy task and coloured the art for the Caves of Grothnar map.

Now it feels like I've pushed through to the other side of my mental block, and v0.36 just needs a little bit more work. Unfortunately, I have some commitments that will be stealing me away for the weekend. Rushing a release always end up being a mistake, so we'll be taking this slow: the plan is a bug testing build on Monday night (Aug 4th), and a full release build the next day or two, depending on how many issues crop up.

Thanks for your patience! Hopefully the new writing is hot enough to justify the wait!

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!