Hello Everyone!

Sorry for the general silence; I've had some real-life work to attend to these past few days. My workload has died down a bit, but I still have a couple of days of work left. Anyway, here's the important stuff.

So, a lot of people have been asking about Small Complex and TacoTales, whether or not those games are going to receive an update. The answer is yes, but in a different way. For a couple of reasons, I've decided to fuse both games into one and, moreover, give it an expanded world and mechanics. One of the reasons is that with the banning of my Patreon page, I've decided to delve much deeper into everything taboo and every subject that I couldn't explore before, basically going hog wild. The second reason is that I want a bit more focus on the projects, and I don't want to divide the community with different games that feel very similar.

With all of that said, I'm deciding which aspects of both games to carry over and which aspects were generally well-received by the majority of you. For the most part, almost all of the ideas and characters from both games are going to return intact in design, with only some readjustments to their ideas. However, there are some other aspects that need some reconsidering.

Let's go over all of the new stuff.

The old block has been transformed into a much larger world to explore. It is now a coastal town, tying in with TacoTales and helping to explain some of the riskier outfits characters might wear.

Since the last Small Complex update, I've continued to improve the shape of the faces, bodies, and the overall feel of all anime characters.

After hours of touching and retouching, I think I've reached a point I'm really satisfied with for some of the characters. Not all of them are going to undergo significant changes, but there were a few whose facial features never quite matched what I envisioned for them.

For now, only Jay has received a significant facial change, as I was never happy with how she looked. I believe she now looks more in line with the other characters and blends better with the cast overall. I'll unveil the rest of the remodels as they become more relevant in the game, but most of them will remain very similar to their previous designs.

These are only the basic structures of the family, and more will be added in the future, such as a sister-in-law. Additionally, there are some other characters aside from these ones. As I mentioned before, all characters from Small Complex and TacoTales will be integrated into the game.

Characters will also wear different outfits depending on the event and time of day.and for some characters even different hairstyles.

So, making a decision on this aspect was quite challenging. It boiled down to whether to use in-game animations or rendered scenes. After going back and forth for a while, I believe it's best to predominantly use rendered scenes with occasional in-game animations. Rendering is my specialty, and I feel much more comfortable with it. While I can make in-game animations look decent, I'd prefer to either improve in that area or enlist the help of someone who specializes in it.

Will there be animated scenes? I'll probably reserve them for important moments. 

Here are some examples (though they may not make it into the game as they are)

Thanks to the new features of the engine, the game has a lot more potential now. And so, I've expanded many aspects of the game. Here's a list of things I'm working on at the moment. I have drawn a lot of inspiration from games from my childhood, like Rune Factory.

Time Passage

Real-time passage of time is now implemented, meaning time no longer operates statically with triggers, but flows as you play the game.

NPC Scheduales.

You'll be able to see and follow the NPCs in their schedules. To be honest, this feature is still in development, and I'm not sure how much I'll be able to fully implement it. At the very least, I know it's possible. So, in the final game, it might be limited to following them to a certain degree, with some teleporting here and there to get them into location.

Resource collecting and crafting:

While I don't plan for this to be a super in-depth mechanic, nor a very obligatory one, I think adding elements to gather, harvest, and craft will enrich the game. I want to weave it into the rest of the mechanics as a complementary feature. As the cast increases in the game, grinding might become a nuisance, so having a good amount of resources to craft cooking dishes or jewelry might speed up the process for players who have been playing for some time. 
Additionally, it gives you the ability to create different items to trigger scenes, such as the sleeping pills. Instead of having money to buy gifts for the characters, this allows you to obtain gifts or money by selling unused resources. So far, it's quite basic, so we'll see how much this idea expands.

This is it for now, I will probably upload a quick test for people to get a feel fopr it and more importabtly gather some performance data as I cannot really get a feel for how the game runs on diferent devices, and with my computer set up for rendering, its quite beffy so even a laggy game can run some what smootly in it.

As for the rest if you have any questions, suggestion or whatever else, you can dm me or contact me, i'm interested in hearing you guys on this one. 

I'll be back to my url work for now, but as soon as that's done i'll have some more <3