Hey there, nudies! We're almost through our character bios! Only 3 more left after these! Kind of exciting to finally get you all acquainted with the main cast. Still got lots of character models to make, but until then... here's our gymbro himbo and a true sawbones, perfect for Halloween...

Name: Rafael “Ralphy” Simmons

Age: 34

Place in Community: "Bear Mode" gym manager, volunteer firefighter, mail deliverer, lifeguard, construction worker, census taker, car washer

Education: Koch's Sports Academy Sales Associate Training Program Graduate

Hobbies: Work, exercise, meal prep

Temperament: Boyscout. Pure of heart and always willing to help, but slightly dense.

Quirks: Surprisingly well-read, so much so that he needs glasses when reading.

Sexual Tendencies: Completely oblivious to people's sexualities and advances, but when the signals finally reach him, he can go to town for hours.

Frustrations: Rest days, can never bring himself to enjoy his time off.

Fears: Ralphy fears that if he slows down and doesn't constantly stay productive for even one day, everything could fall apart.

The nephew of a famous TV fitness host, Ralphy has always wanted to motivate and inspire people to get physical, just as his fabulous uncle did. But unfortunately no matter how friendly you are, being the manager of a sporting good store means no one wants to listen to you off the clock.

 The fatigue and depression he felt as a retail manager drove Ralphy to seek out a new life in Culo Culo, where he would open a gym to fulfill his dreams... but it's low to no attendance means that the gym mostly runs itself. Ralphy keeps himself busy taking on whatever odd jobs he can around Culo Culo, sometimes voluntarily and without pay if it keeps him busy. As long as he's staying productive and making friends, it's worth it to him. And maybe one day, he'll inspire them to hit the gym with him...

Name: Dr. Kara Lovelace, MD

Age: 36

Place in Community: Town doctor

Education: Bachelor's degree, doctor of medicine 

Hobbies: Hyperviolent gorefest grindhouse horror flicks

Temperament: A bit off-kilter, loves throwing in dark humor and being a little menacing

Quirks: Confident and menacing, but not unhinged (and willing to mince details for the more squeamish out of consideration)

Sexual Tendencies: Likes her partners chained and bound, with bright red whip marks and slightly burned by candle wax

Frustrations: Cutesy crap, politicians, soccer moms, people who can't separate fiction from reality

Fears: Nothing, except for the idea that no one may trust her just because of her favorite genre of film. And spiders.

Kara Lovelace was a model student all throughout medical school. Her professors would have never expected someone so diligent could really be a goth punk horror freak in her private life. An accident at a young age rendered her right eye permanently damaged, originally making her scared and self-conscious... but somehow, horror movies became a reliable source of comfort, helping her grow into the doctor she is now. With fear conquered, she wields it like a scalpel now... Though she always maintains a strict sense of medical professionalism on the clock.

While she considers her work as a doctor far more important, Kara longs to one day channel her love of fear and knowledge of gore to create her own slasher movie. She's dying to take a stab at directing, but can't bring herself to pull the trigger. If only she would find some willing victims...

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And that's these two! With these characters, we wanted to add some really interesting twists to what you may imagine these characters act like. Ralphy was originally JUST a gymbro, but we realized a lot of roles in Culo Culo Town were still unfilled. We didn't want to add more characters, so I thought it'd be fun if one of the NPCs in Culo Culo just... had a bunch of jobs. That role ended up on Ralphy, and that inspired me to work that into his entire character. Kara's visual design was actually created by our 3D modeler Bear Festival (also why Ralphy's gym is named "Bear Mode"), but he left it up to me to give her a personality. I thought anime cosplay fan at first, but that became more of Cherry's thing. I had gotten heavily into the Friday the 13th and Child's Play movies at the time though, so I settled on slasher fan. Overall, I'm REALLY happy with how these two shaped up.

That's it for today, though! Thank you so much for your support, and see you next time!

Hey there, nudies! Sorry for the slight delay! Was a bit of a busy weekend for me, and I'm currently trying to get this progress report out before my covid/flu shot combo just knocks me out. Killerbro was also away for a little vacation, so not much got done on the programming front, but Anneliese made some serious strides when it comes to the game's visuals!

Seriously, look at that grass! We're still tweaking it to look just right but my jaw dropped when I saw it in action. It looks so pretty! So flush! And with no real performance hit, either! I work with some incredible people, seriously. Anneliese even got god rays working right! This forest just keeps looking better and better! Now, can we get some slight physics to have the grass part as Amber walks through? Soft grass on bare skin... Man, this game is a dream come true.

Anneliese also started working on some game UI elements, like this time of day indicator! Granted, you'll be strutting your stuff outside most of the time, but since time of day is a key element to the game, we thought it'd be good to have a little UI element. Helps that it's also nice and stylish. But that's not all, because we're also working on...

Loading screens! This is more of a mock-up, but we found this cool wiggling text generation tool that was perfect for a loading screen transition, so we wanted to utilize it. We'd like to randomize the loading screen with a few random messages, wanna sneak in some fun ones. Anneliese also whipped up the screen swipe effect, too! They're really the MVP this report. Thank you so much, Anneliese!

With Killerbro back, the big focus this week will be cutscene building! Hoping to have some really fun stuff to show you as I roll up my sleeves and start getting this dialogue into the game!

That's it for today, though! Thank you so much for your support, and see you next week!

Hey there, nudies! As mentioned last week, I'm out for a convention/root canal (not at the same place, thankfully), so this week's post will be spotlighting two more of our beloved Culo Culo citizens. These two are a couple of cuties I KNOW you'll like! Check 'em out!

Name: Charlene Lafrenais

Age: 27

Place in Community: "Silicone Valleys" sex toy shop owner

Education: High school graduate, still saving up for college (on year 10 now)

Hobbies: Reverse engineering random electronics, programming

Temperament: Chipper, very relaxed and casual

Quirks: Licks batteries for thrills

Sexual Tendencies: Loves selling, advertising, and especially loves using as many sex toys as she can fit.

Frustrations: Proprietary components, strict company warranties, prudes

Fears: Only barely able to make ends meet, Charlene fears she may have wasted her career on a thing people find too shameful to support.

Charlene graduated high school with honors but didn’t receive the scholarship she wanted, she told her parents. She saved up to move to a different state for a different college… saving, and saving, and saving. But Charlene had a secret little hobby - sex toys of all kinds. She loved collecting them, she ESPECIALLY loved using them, and she loved the artistry that went into making them.

At some point, her desire to go to college dwindled, and Charlene began to instead study more about the production, logistics, and sale of sex toys. It all eventually came to a head. Charlene risked it all and blew her whole college fund to open up her own sex toy shop in Culo Culo, with the intent to make her own original toys to try to sell alongside popular models. Unfortunately, that gamble hasn’t paid off yet.

Name: Debbie Mae Hayter

Age: 23

Place in Community: Librarian and town record-keeper.

Education: GED, 2 year game design college course (learning RPG Designer 2003)

Hobbies: Tactical espionage action games, spy movies, ninja literature

Temperament: Polite and quiet, but will yap nonstop with trusted allies

Quirks: Likes to sneak up on people when she can.

Sexual Tendencies: Constantly fighting the urge to sneak around naked when no one's around.

Frustrations: Loud people, bright lights, fanfiction written by people without a real grasp on the characters

Fears: Her timid nature makes Debbie very afraid of the idea of her secret lifestyle being exposed.

A diehard fan of the stealth espionage video game series Splinter Gear, Debbie lives the life of a devoted fangirl. This unassuming dorky librarian knows tons of spy trivia, adjacent military history, ninja tactics, and has even made it a habit to sneak around people in her day to day life as Culo Culo Town's librarian. She will pop up when no one expects it, swearing that she doesn't mean to sneak up on people but secretly extremely proud of her near invisibility.

While in public she's very quiet and timid, she spends all of her private time reading fanfiction and fantheories. She's become so obsessive of her favorite media that it's begun to enter her fantasies, pulling at her heart to experience the ultimate stealth thrill...

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What do you think? Interesting characters, yeah? One who's desperate to have their hobbies shared, and the other wants to keep them a total secret. Both characters actually had their roots in a previous adult game project I worked on that didn't quite pan out, but I loved these designs so much that I brought them over. I think Anneliese's versions of these characters came out ESPECIALLY cute. Can't wait to write more of them~

That's it for today, though! Thank you so much for your support, and see you next week!

Hey again, nudies! I realized we're at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY of these progress reports! I think I'm gonna have to stop numbering them at this point because good lord, that's so many. At some point, you run into a Final Fantasy situation where the numbers are so high that it gets intimidating! But seriously, think you all so much for your generous support over these years. And don't worry, we've got LOTS of progress to show!

One of Bear's big projects this week was perfecting what we call "The Dream Tree". It's a notable tree with some notes attached to its limbs, and is very important to the plot of MNL. We knew we had to make it look good.

It originally just looked like this, which you may remember from progress reports in the past.

Not... particularly dream-like, huh? But now after several months since its original iteration...

THAT'S a tree! Through the magic of shaders and textures, we've got something REALLY nice. And what would a tree be without some wind rustling through its leaves, huh?

Check out the videos below! This one was set up be Anneliese and it's so good that we can even account for HURRICANE WINDS. Not that that'll happen, of course, but it IS funny.

Unfortunately, after a WHOLE lot of fretting and furrowed brows, we've decided to ditch our previous dialogue engine, Dialogic. It just wasn't working out for what we needed now with our cutscene controls and it was going to take too long to custom code a bunch of stuff just to get Dialogic to work. When the game had more of a "visual novel" direction, it was fine, but now... eh. A shame... but we've already got dialogue working again through the default tools, and it's actually much easier.

You can see it in one of the videos below. Ignore the dialogue itself, but this was a test Killerbro made for both dialogue and camera movement to make sure both worked alongside each other. Aaaand they do! We're prettying the dialogue box back up to make sure it meets our visual standards, but we've got a LOT of things working now. Body and face animations, camera movement, dialogue choices, and even directing character movement in cutscenes!

Along with prettying up the box itself, we do still need to figure out a way to smooth transitions between animations. Otherwise, characters hard reset back to their default idle, or they'll just snap in place for the next animation. Not ideal, but fixable. We'll try to have that figured out by next report.

Speaking of which, I have both a convention AND a root canal coming up this week, so unfortunately, I won't be able to have a report ready for next weekend! In lieu of that, I'll have another character bio post queued up and ready for Saturday. This one will focus on the librarian and the sex shop owner! Ooooh~!

But that'll be it for today! Thank you so much for your support, and see you next week!

Hey there nudies! We're still troubleshooting some dialogic problems, so this week's post is another set of character bios! We're hitting you with our double D's... Dan and Diana! Though they both have their own shops at the same strip mall (coincidentally right across from our previous two character bio spotlights Cherry and Jam), they couldn't be more opposite.

Name: Daniel Adler

Age: 30

Place in Community: “Blaster Nation" used video games and arcade owner

Education: High school graduate

Hobbies: Hardcore video games, especially pertaining around sixth generation, 128-bit home consoles

Temperament: Obnoxious when it comes to properly enjoying video games, but not a bad guy

Quirks: Stand-offish, elitist, but a wife-guy at heart.

Sexual Tendencies: Installs nude mods purely to fight censorship, as this is what the creators TRUE intentions obviously must have been.

Frustrations: Casual gamers, cheaters, trolls, griefers, children, spammers, campers, scalpers, people with bad internet connections, people who pick high tiers, people who pick low tiers, people who pick boss characters or legendaries, and like any true self-respecting gamer, Dan ESPECIALLY hates video games.

Fears: After moving across the country and setting up shop in a new place, Dan fears that there are no true gamers here other than himself.

Originally from Sucre Marron, Louisiana, Dan is the husband of successful sc-fi detective fiction writer Kimberly Adler. With the success of Kim's books, the married couple bought a house in the burgeoning Culo Culo Town where Dan would use his wife allowance money to open a used video game store and arcade. Kim is often either writing books or on book and press tours, so Dan runs the shop on his own. Despite this, Dan and Kim's relationship remains rock solid and they communicate through online messenger when Kim's away. 

Dan is a... difficult person to get along with as someone who both loves and hates video games, but will open up if you share his particular interests. More than anything, Dan just wants to finally meet his equal in the gaming space.

Name: Diana Frost

Age: 28

Place in Community: "The Fourth Space" thrift store employee.

Education: High school graduate, pursued a bachelor's in journalism but flunked out.

Hobbies: Listening to shortwave number stations, reading true-account paranormal mysteries on the internet.

Temperament: Mostly aloof, but is very serious when it comes to supernatural phenomena.

Quirks: Does not believe in aliens and refuses to entertain the idea as other than hokey science fiction.

Sexual Tendencies: A complete pillow princess, needs someone to take the initiative.

Frustrations: Closed-minded people who can't open their eyes to the truth around them. Loiterers, specifically a particular nudist who won't stop hanging around her clothing shop.

Fears: Aliens.

Ever since she was young, Diana has had an interest in the unexplainable. Obsessed with eye witness ghost encounters and sightings of strange creatures, Diane made it her mission to discover the truth. Unfortunately, it’s hard to pursue the truth when you’ve got bills to pay... But luckily, she found a listing for a thrift store clerk position in the newly established Culo Culo Town, conveniently located near the forest and mountains where strange sightings have reportedly occurred...

Diana wants to explore the Culo Culo wilds and solve its many mysteries, but it's difficult (not to mention a bit scary) to go camping all on your own out there. Where will she find a willing partner to help discover the truth that's out there?

What do you think? These are probably two of the more difficult characters to get along with, but I think they'll make for some interesting encounters. Diana has some very blatant David Lynch and X-Files inspirations, which the team REALLY latched onto. And Dan actually comes from me and Leslie's very first webcomic, Blaster Nation! Consider this an alternate universe of sorts if you remember that comic.

That's it for today, though! Thank you so much for your support, and see you next week with more!

Hey there, nudies! Hope I didn't scare you with a progress report so soon after the last one! We're back on our regular schedule with some great things to show! We've adjusted the colors a bit but most importantly, LOOK! Amber's outline is back! She looked so NAKED without it (but now looks way more naked the appropriate way)!

We've also listened to some fan comments and adjusted the cross-hatch effect on Amber herself. Before, the cross-hatching effect would entirely cover Amber if she was in shadow. Now when she's in shadow, the cross-hatch effect will only apply in shadier spots along her body. Should be much easier on the eyes! Doesn't have as much of an effect when she's out in the light, but as mentioned, we adjusted the colors a bit. The game's so vibrant and colorful! It's so nice to look at, I think~ Check out the videos below to see what we mean!

We're also working on finalizing the campsite area, but we needed to fill it out a bit more. To that end, we're filling out the lake a bit more and will add a mountain beyond it as a backdrop. I think it's gonna come out looking really nice with all the other effects we've been adding! Bear's really been flexing their environmental skills lately!

And last is an interesting one that we've been testing around with. As you can see in the animations above, Amber's moving pretty normally, right? At least from what you've seen. But hear me out... Anneliese showed me a little test they were working on. Take a look in that first video down there.

This might be harder to tell if you're not looking for it, but we cut the framerate on Amber's animations a bit. The game itself is still targetting 60 frames, but Amber's frames are cut in half which... looks kinda good, honestly? I think it makes her feel a bit more cartoony, really helps sell some of the poses, and feels weirdly natural for her look. We're currently testing around with other animations to see how this effect looks across the board, but I wanted to show you all and gauge how you felt.

Current issues we're working on: Killerbro's been having a hard time reconnecting our Dialogic dialogue system back to the game the way our previous programmer had it set up. Not all the functionality is working the way we want it to and we're having a hard time figuring out exactly why. We may have to try a new dialogue system or some custom coding depending on how the week goes, but that's our big priority right now. I'm dying to show off some character interactions!

That's it for tonight's report though! Thank you all so much for your support, and see you again next week!