Hey there, nudies! Apologies for being a bit late on this progress report. Took a bit of time to get everything to work, but I'll get into that later. Right now, it's bath time!

Me and Invertex have been deliberating on how exactly we would incorporate showering into this game. It's been something we've been struggling with since the very inception of this game under Jaguar's watch. We obviously want to include showering - how could you not? But at the same time, we don't really want to implement a hygiene system to force you to shower. If a mechanic like that is mandatory, then it kinda takes the fun out of it, you know? So what do we do? Make it a mini-game? How would that mini-game work in context? Do we just have it as an optional thing to do? Include it only in a story moment and make it a cutscene? We fretted for quite a while, until we had an idea...

What if showers functioned as a save area? The more we explored the idea, the more sense it made. Save rooms in games are often areas of rest and relaxation, and what better place to do that than in the shower? As a nudist, Amber doesn't have to worry about dirtying clothes or even towels. She can hop in the shower for a quick rinse any time she wants! It's just down the hall from her room, so it's a short little detour if you want a quick save. This way, we even incorporate that element of "hygiene" into the game design by encouraging the player to shower every day as a means to save their game. You don't HAVE to, naturally. But you'll probably want to!

We've been wondering how best to incorporate a save/load system into the game, and limiting the save room to Amber's shower gives us a number of benefits, development-wise. By locking save functionality to the act of showering, it limits where and how players can save or load their game. While it would be more convenient to be able to save and load anywhere, we want to encourage players to act more spontaneously during gameplay. If you're like me, you'll want to explore everything and save before committing to any action to min/max your time in Culo Culo Town. But if the ability to save is tied to an action that you have to go out of the way to do, it becomes inconvenient to save before everything. And since your schedule in Culo Culo Town is pretty open and free, the hope is that players will just say "fuck it" and have fun with whatever catches their eye, without the need to go save real quick before you do anything.

Now, you probably have some concerns. After all, Culo Culo Town is presumably a big place. It would be very limiting to only be allowed to save your game in Amber's bathroom, right? But here's the really fun part - It's the ACT of showering that saves your game. You're not limited to Amber's bathroom. If you're bold enough, any spot with enough running water can act as a shower, especially if you're a nudist! Save your game out in town by showering at the public beach showers, the gym showers, in the mall's fountain, on the street with a broken fire hydrant, or even just with a garden hose! You may draw some looks in public places, so you do have to raise your stats in order to shower everywhere. But once you do, the whole world is your shower!

In not save-showering news, we've also been working on reworking Amber's home for Godot. Amber's home has been... tricky, to say the least. It was the first thing our original lead made using various asset packs, but the nature of those asset packs make it extremely hard to work with. It's essentially the only thing in our game that wasn't made from scratch with the express purpose of using it for MNL. In addition to that, the tight, enclosed space of Amber's home has made ut difficult to get our camera system working within it. But I think we've finally wrangled it together and have made it cooperate.

We've got some nice fixed camera angles, a tracking system, a smooth transition from room to room, all smoothly operated with just your mouse! Invertex did an incredible job getting this all working so smoothly, and from what he's told me, it wasn't easy! Since we wanted to make this game completely functional with just a mouse, it meant that every room and area needed to be able to convey its information as efficiently as possible to the player without the need of any direct camera control. That means knowing what you can interact with, where you can go in it, what the purpose of the area even is. Amber's room in particular was tricky, because not only was it small, every major thing in the room was basically in opposite ends of each other.

 

It took a lot of tweaking, but we managed to get everything visible from one single camera angle. But to do that, we actually had to move something. Amber originally had a little corner cubby spot with a desk and computer, but to make sure we got the angle we wanted, we had to move that whole set-up down a floor.

Thankfully, it works pretty well there! But that's the kinda stuff you have to account for in designing a game like this. When you have fixed camera angles, you need to make sure the player can easily explore and get a read on anything they can do on it. If the camera needs to transition from one shot to another, it has to be done in a way that doesn't disorient the player and confuses them. There's lots of little things to consider! I could talk forever about it, but this post is getting a bit long. I'll grant you mercy and call it here.

Thank you all for your continued support! See you next week!

Hey there, nudies! Sorry for the late post! Suffered a bit of heat exhaustion from some intense yardwork. All good now!

We're taking these building blocks and connecting them together! This week was mostly spent getting our loading zones to connect. We didn't have to worry about them in our previous iteration back on Unity, but now that we've added more areas to explore, we've had to go ahead and figure out how to connect him. As you can see in the GIF, Invertex set up a nice little loading zone that you can walk through to get from the cafe zone and the residential zone. Invertex also whipped up a nice little arrow that appears wherever you click! You can play this game completely with your mouse! Convenient!

The other thing we're working on is save functionality. We're doing something a little different with our save system that ties into our gameplay philosophy, so we'll save that for next week's post. It does have a nice little visual element that I'm sure you'll love, though! In the meantime, we've got some more art! Here's a sneak peek at next week's pin ups from Sweez:

And we also have a very bouncy UI element from Nalem! I mentioned before about a stamina bar system for Amber. Essentially that she can run around for a brief amount of time indicated by an depleting bar, but instead of depicting how much energy she has, the bar represents how long she can run before her boobs bouncing around gets too uncomfortable. Well, Nalem whipped us up a UI element just for that!

 

Boing, boing, boing... They're hypnotic, aren't they?

That's all for today, though! See you next week with more!

Hey there, nudies! Hope you're handling the heat well this summer, because we got hot new rewards to debut this month! We wanted to do something to help flesh out Amber and the town she lives in (and to be honest, encourage more people to throw their financial support behind the game), so we'll be doing comics and pin ups every month!

For $5 supporters, we'll be posting full-color comic pages! Canonically-speaking, these comics take place a few weeks after Amber has settled in to her new nudist lifestyle. If you want to get a sneak peek at her during her day to day naked life interacting with other townspeople, you'll definitely want to check these out!

For $10 supporters, not only will you get the previously mentioned comic, but you'll also be getting pin ups! These will be full-colored, poster-sized pin ups showing off Amber in all her glory! We'll also include variants of each pin up, whether they be different expressions, altered poses, or even spicy, sexier versions!

Both of these will be drawn by Birthday Suit Studio's very own Sweez and written by yours truly, official game writer Brad. They're as canon as they can get! They'll be posted and available on the first of every month. Support the project any time during the month to get access to them!

As for the actual progress report, I've been cleaning up the last bit of management-related tasks. I needed to redo our trello board since it was way out of date, but now it's all cleaned up with everyone's current tasks. With all the management stuff out of the way, it's back to writing and designing!

Invertex has been tackling various UI elements of the game. Button remapping, game settings, pause and menu options, and even the main title screen. A whole lot of little things! We're going to spend this week getting more UI elements made and implemented, so we should hopefully have some nicer screenshots to show soon.

Nalem's working on a very cute UI element that I really can't wait to show off, and Bear is back on buildings. We've opted for a new approach when it comes to level design - rather than have Bear build the whole level from the grass to the buildings, Bear will just build us individual assets (like buildings) alone, letting Invertex and I worry about placing it in the world itself. This way, it's much easier for us to move and redo areas if another coffee zone-event happens where we realize that we need to reorganize the whole area for game design reasons. Bear's currently working on the first new building for a brand new zone...

Very official looking building, isn't it! Look at that tiny Amber model waaaay down there. Little does she know that the watchful architecture of bureaucracy looms behind her...

But that's it for today! Thank you all so much! I'll be posting those new rewards immediately after this post goes live! Hope to see you then!

Hey there, nudies! Unfortunately, we had to prioritize some back-end tasks this week, so nothing too fancy to show tonight. Invertex wrote up a script to help with importing assets and setting up materials so we don't have to manually convert every single thing one by one every time. It's something that will save us a lot of time in the long run. I myself realized that the demo has changed considerably since our Unity days, and I've needed to go and redo a bunch of project management stuff and rewrite a new general outline to ensure that everyone is on the same page. We're doing useful stuff, but it's not great visual material, if you get what I mean.

So here's the things that ARE great visual material! Bear finished up the fem-tourist NPC! Check her out!

She's still being rigged, so she kinda has a bit of Goomba-mouth going on. That or I've been playing too much Paper Mario: TTYD. 

 

I particularly love the texturing on her hat. It came out very nice! Bear did a fantastic job as he always does~

Meanwhile, Sweez is wrapping up our new rewards for next month! If you want a tease of the world and vibe of MNL, you won't have to wait much longer! Here's a sneak peek of a colorful bonus comic to help get you nice and comfy in Culo Culo Town.

 

This'll be available for all $5+ supporters! But $10+ supporters will get a special little bonus pin up~

 

These'll go out at the beginning of next month! We'll be doing a comic and pin up every month to highlight Amber and the townspeople. No spoilers for the game, besides the fact that Amber will be butt-naked in these!

And that's all for today! See you next week with more!