Hello everyone, welcome to the 115th progress report!

As I'm writing this progress report, the gallery is just about done. Here's a little overview of what it looks like:

It's a very simple design as you can see, but my goal is to make it functional first and foremost. It's also not fully done yet, but it's getting there.
As you can see, you can get small hints about how to unlock scenes from the gallery itself. As of now, there are 16 entries to the gallery. If at some point you guys feel that a scene deserves to be in the gallery, I'll add it in ASAP.

In other news, I've released that RIley render I talked about, that I made on Blender. People who've seen it seemed to like it, and appart from some issues I got with the hair, I think it turned out great. Even more random news that I still feel like sharing, the dev's assistant (my cat) has been feeling sick lately. Please send us your best get well wishes, and I'll give her head scratches (and even belly rubs, if I'm feeling adventurous) accordingly.

I'm not too sure what I'll be working on next. First I'll finish tying up the small tasks I need to to finish the gallery of course, but after that, I don't know. It's either going to be Riley related, or now that Darkly Marie (the newly hired UI artist) is about to work on the final look of the assets for the new food menu, I might switch to that. To be honest that 0.5.5 update is starting to bloat itself out in my head, pretty much like any other regular update has since the beginning of development, you guys might get more than you bargained for. And to my great sorrow, it may take longer to release :')

Anyway, there's still a lot to do, so I'll cut that short. I expect development to ramp up in the coming days/weeks. Cheers :)

Hello everyone, welcome to the 114th progress report!

Before we talk about what I've been doing for the last 12-ish days, let me address something I forgot to mention last time: 0.5.5 will probably break saves. That's one of the reasons why I didn't want to work on save compatibility just now, you never know where development will go and what changes will be made when a game is in such a work-in-progress state, and you might have to make changes that, no matter what you do, save compatibility will be impossible.
Now it's not all bad, I can say I've made save compatibility work once, and I now have a better understanding of how it works. additionally, the more changes to the gameplay I make, the less I need to make in the future. Especially with how in-depth changes in 0.5.5 will be. Meaning that changes that break saves will be increasingly rarer after 0.5.5.

Now, about work.
First, I found a UI artist. it happened quite quickly since it's one of you guys, that person has read the previous progress report where I stated I wanted to hire a professional artist, and they decided to contact me. They've already sent me mockups, and I expect them to work in a more definitive manner around the 5th. Have a look at what we've got so far:

Keep in mind that those are VERY early, and are simple mockups. They already look way better than any menu I've ever done, so it's still a good start I would say :')

Other than that, I found myself stuck in the Blender rabbit hole, as usual. I prepared the house on Blender for future use, and I used it as a learning ground. I can say I've both done and learnt a lot the past 10 days, and I'm getting increasingly more comfortable with Blender. I've rendered some of the game's locations on Blender, so you can see for yourself:

The last one (Riley's bedroom), is one I used to try out compositing nodes. Those are used as finishing touches for renders. They include glare, color grading, lens distortion... Here I only used some glare and color grading, and I probably overdid it with one of those once again, lol.

Now I'm working on a Riley render on Blender which should include most of what I've learnt so far, like cloth simulation, and some heavier sculpting which I can't do on DAZ. I was hoping to include some boobie physics to have them in a more natural-looking manner, but my attempt didn't go so well. It's fine, it was still a great learning experience, and I'll just sculpt them instead.

Anyway. I'll keep this report short, but just know that there's a lot happening behind the scenes. I'm stoked about working with someone for the first time for example (not including the testers of course), and I believe that kind of thing will greatly increase the game's quality.
My next task is probably to work on the gallery, but I have yet to make a final decision on which scenes it's going to include. If you have any idea, let me know. Just know that "all the scenes in the game, narrative ones and all!" is not a real possibility, with the UI I have in mind. That would be too much work for a first draft.

Anyway, I'll conclude today's progress report with that. I'll try finishing the Riley render in a timely manner, and it will be posted here and on Discord as a spoiler render for manager-tier subs as usual. Thank you for reading, and take care :)

Hello everyone, welcome to the 113th progress report!

Wowowow, an other progress report incoming! Brace yourselves, this is an other important one. I'm dividing it again into sections for your reading comfort.

So I found it incredibly difficult to write lately. It's a case of having so many things to do or to think about, you spend all day planning, and thinking about them, and starting work on 3 things at once, and at the end of the day you accomplished nothing. I just can't focus on a single thing, and it's bad. Now, the main problem is that it's not just the writing, as you now, I also have the Blender stuff to allocate time to, and that's not even the only thing holding me back.

Actually, let's talk about Blender for a bit. Learning how to make an animation is easy. Learning how to fix the 10 000 things that can go wrong is hard. Same goes for working on all the details that need to go right to make a good-looking animation, that's just how learning a software works. As you may remember, I said I'd release the loop I had been working on at the time. Well, I've redone it, lit it, expanded it, and now it looks better than ever! Trust me, I've seen it on the viewport, and it looks great. But there are two main issues that prevent me from releasing it. First, unlike my test Shadowheart animation, I can't render it on Eevee. I couldn't make it look good this time, so I'll have to use Cycles. (for those who don't know, Eevee is a real-time render engine, so, a very fast one like you'd see on video games. Cycles is a "classic" render engine, more precise and detailed, but it takes a long time, like Iray on DAZ). Then, even the best animation is ruined by stiff hair. Good hair animation tutorials are surprisingly rare, and for some reason half of them use an add-on (WiggleBones 2) that I couldn't make work to save my life. And that's in all the different configurations I tried using it. Some unnatural jitter, bones sticking to mesh instead of simply colliding, bones sepparating and stretching for no reason... Those are some of the issues I've encountered. So anyway. It's coming along, I'm still working on it (I'll be working on it live this evening), but now you see how that can take a bit too much brainspace.

So with the Blender stuff out of the way, let's talk about that other thing.
So, the game isn't very fun, as of now. There are many interactions in the game that are just here to provide gameplay for the heck of it, giving gameovers if you don't pay attention to them. 

The mood system is one of them. It's a incomplete system born from a very, very early idea of AHITD, dating back to 0.3 at the latest. When I first started thinking about the game, there was much more to do, on paper. Like fixing the house in a much more detailed way, making it secure... All of that was ditched because of time and technical limitations. But now the mood system is still here, and there's basically nothing to make use of it, or to support it. Nothing gives mood appart from the food system and a few dialogue options, and most importantly, it doesn't reward the player. It's just there as a gameover mechanic, but any game mechanic's importance shouldn't be limited to "if you don't pay attention to me, you lose". The money system works the same: if you click me a few times, you won't get gameover. The money making system (graphic design job) right now is also very dull, so the very few rewards it gets (it has a small advantage over the mood system in that regard) isn't very rewarding either, because there's no challenge to getting money. You don't feel like you earned the reward as much as you should.

So that's one of the things that's been occupying my mind the last few weeks. Making AHITD into a proper game. I've been pondering the idea of taking care of that later for reasons I'll talk about later in this section, but for one, as I said, it's been taking too much of my attention lately to the point that I have trouble being creative in any other aspect of the development, but also, I have pretty clear picture of what I want to do, so I might as well beat the iron while it's hot.

So, here's what's going to change moving along.

MOOD:
First, the mood system will be replaced with the horniness system. The goal won't be to keep your housemates happy, but horny. This in turn will dictate how well and how often they do their horniness-dependent jobs. With that the mood gameovers are ditched, and only the money gameover is left.

FOOD:
The food system will be simplified. No more ingredients, no more 1 meal per person, it's just one meal to feed everybody. Meals will be unlocked by finding recipe books here and there around the game world. Each meal will give base horniness points to every girl (depending on how rare/exensive/advanced the meal is) and additionnal points to some girls, depending on how they like the meal.

GOODS:
Money-making will be made less boring.


Okay, I haven't completely figured that part yet. Some key points I have right now is that it should use Alice's horniness system, and that it needs to be horny in nature, and it should be able to be done from her bedroom, ideally. I know, there's an obvious job that crosses all those requirements, but I don't wanna resort to that if I can help it. I'll try finding a more original solution shortly.

LOOKS:
The game's menus aren't very good-looking. Specifically the food system menus, the cooking menu and the fridge menu are particularly ugly. This is not a good thing when you try to make people interact with those systems. And especially when food is involved. 
I'm planning on hiring a 2D UI artist to have those menus made by a professional. Unlocking recipes shouldn't just be a good thing from a gameplay standpoint, I think it should also be satisfying to unlock from an aesthetic standpoint, like when you unlock an upgrade on Cookie Clicker (for example). Like, here you go: good-looking meal card, along with a funny description, neat! So there's that. It's not starting well. I came into contact with a 2D artist a year ago that worked on a big adult game name, and when I tried contacting them again about 2 days ago they haven't answered. Well, plenty of fish in the sea.

I'll be trying to release all that like I've done with 0.4.5, within about 3 months time. I'll try to throw in improvements like the gallery system, replacing pseudo-animations with animations, and other things I need to touch up on. Also, if the money system replacement turns out to be too much, or if I can't come up with a satisfying idea in due time, I'll ditch it and focus on those smaller improvements instead. My priority is the mood and food system replacement.

Sorry, it's an other lengthy post. I think this just goes to show how full my brain is, and that I need to free up some space by turning all those thoughts into work on the game. Thank you for your support, and for reading all that. See you on the next one :)

I'll be streaming Blender tonight btw, in case you wanna see how the animation is coming along. See ya :)