Last Human Ep4 (Devlog 11)

Hello and happy weekend my friends! I have a few bits of news along with the latest development status of Last Human episode 4.

Today, I'll be sharing with you links to all of my sites. Many people who newly joined the adult vn community have no idea that creators live all over the internet, and I'm no different. I try to spread my wholesome and cheesy love as far as I can! Some people prefer some platforms over others for keeping up with their favorite adult games, so here is my list along with a new one I joined some time back but haven't been active on until recently.

Patreon: I've have been on Patreon since around mid-2020. Patreon is where I receive most of my monetary support, currently at 273 paid members (1990 total members). I have a free tier if you just want to follow, and paid tiers ranging from $2 up to $50. (Please note, paying to join a paid tier is NOT required to get any of my games - you can just wait through the beta process and get it free, usually around 2 weeks after beta release).

SubscribeStar: I had started this page then abandoned it because I had issues with it. But I am fully active here now. All of my releases and posted updates can be found here the same as Patreon. I don't have as many paid subscribers here as Patreon, but it's growing little by little. I have tiers in the Free, $2, $5, $10, and $15 ranges here.

itch.io: I think I was on itch a few months before I created a Patreon. All public posts are also shared on my itch page so if you prefer that platform, you won't miss anything! If you want to support me with money, itch is a nice place to do that if you just want to contribute one time, or anytime, any amount. Again, this is not necessary to play my games... they are always free after the 2 week beta period. This page links to each of my games on the itch platform.

X (formerly Twitter): I still call it Twitter. X is stupid! Anyway... I use this for sharing news of recent updates and posts along with new builds. No download links are shared there, but you can follow me there and you'll know when I post a new devlog on Patreon. I also sometimes post custom or special images in there.

Spicy Gaming: This is a fast growing platform for adult visual novels, created by the community. Adult Game related news, reviews, and tons of other content, along with the games themselves of course. You can find me there as well and all of my projects can be downloaded there: Serenity, Serenity Chapter 2, and Last Human. Be sure to subscribe to me on there and give my games a like and maybe a review. I believe at some point, you'll be able to donate/contribute to me there if you choose to. But my games are free to download on this site.

I am also working on rebuilding my personal "N2TheFire Games" website. I'll share that in a later post. I've had the site for a long time but just haven't been using it. I'll let you know once I have it ready to go but I'm hoping to have my games downloadable from there. I am in the process of redesigning it and upgrading the package to accommodate more traffic and download bandwidth.

Finally, the devlog itself... Things have been progressing nicely. I still feel like I should have this finished for a beta release on my birthday (July 28th) but we'll see how it goes. It's going to be tight for sure. Really not much else to say on development that I didn't already tell you in my last post a few days ago. So I'll stop here and wish you all a great weekend... love you all, ...Fire

Last Human Ep4 (Devlog 8)

Happy Thursday everyone! I'm posting this devlog a day earlier because well, it's Friday for me since I am off work tomorrow. I took off so that I can focus on finishing some scene work for a section of the episode that I ended up rewriting yesterday. Yeah, you know me... I just got to reading through it and it didn't feel exciting enough to me. So, I rewrote 3 scenes. These scenes are related to an 'away' mission (using Star Trek analogy there hehe). The 'bread and butter' of Last Human are the 'away' missions because with this mechanic, I can go literally anywhere and create anything my mind comes up with. Endless possibilities. It gives me room to really explore. All while being entertained by the daily engagements between Captain and crew.

Recently I revealed Ecko (the final name I decided to give her). Ecko is basically half Teldarian and half machine. A cyborg, if you will. She was a planned character 4 years ago when I first started writing Last Human as a story. As a cyborg, Ecko has basically the same strengths as MC. She has a peaceful, sweet demeanor and prefers peace over fighting. But this may be a conflict she has to overcome later on if she is forced to fight in order to protect others. The image of her I released earlier was just a few concept renders. She has changed slightly as you can see.

Moving on... with the rewriting I did, so far this week I've been mostly focused on that and also working on the scene renders themselves at the same time. Still, none of this really set me back all that much. So, I'm still making great progress. I plan to have these 'away mission' scenes completed over this weekend.

I also did some testing with different ways to make my episode playlist. It won't be in the next update, but hopefully the episode 5 update. The idea behind the playlist is that you won't really have to depend on saves to pick up where you left off when an update comes out. I will add the option to name your character (and pet name) there when you go to play an episode. It also makes it easier for you to replay an episode that was your favorite.

Future of Last Human... After thinking about it for a while and reading all of my notes and ideas for episodes, I've decided that season 1 of LH will be 8 episodes total. This will be a good stopping point to keep the filesize to a minimum, but with enough content to read through. Season 2 will also be 8 episodes. This is to help maintain a manageable filesize for everyone. But once season 2 (for example) is completed, I will create an optional download that combines both seasons into one build. I haven't thought much beyond season 2 yet because I'm pretty sure that during the last few episodes of season 1, I will have finished Serenity and started on Viral Affair. None of this is carved in stone yet, of course. Just giving you a rough idea of my plans. Once chapter 2 of Serenity is completed, work on Viral Affair will begin immediately after. For my Serenity fans... don't worry too much. There is a good chance I may have some smaller projects that revisit that world down the road. Also, at some point, I do still want to rework chapter 1 because well, its really cringe and I hate that. And for fans of Camilla, yes... I want to do something special where you get to fun time with her as "not her brother". I have already written some preliminary story ideas for that one and it will likely be very good stuff. I didn't do that great with personalities of the girls early on and still fight with that now, but my Camilla project is going to be very different.

A lot of plans and ideas, I know. I am in this for the long haul and whether I was doing this on Patreon or not, I'd still do this just because that creative side of me NEEDS to get it done and see it come alive. Meanwhile, this all happens one step at a time and unfortunately, I'm just one person that still works a full time job aside from this. So, hang in there, stick with me, be patient ;)

Love you all, ...Fire

Last Human Ep4 (Devlog 7)

Happy Friday everyone! It has been a productive week. One of my more productive weeks in quite a while honestly, and that's a great feeling. Last weekend I re-released episode 3 and I guess a few people seem to need some explanation because people got upset that it wasn't the new content (episode 4). Realistically, you guys know I can't complete an episode that fast. Still, I know these updates take a long time and people can become frustrated or even impatient. I can forgive that because it means I'm doing at least a decent job with this. It means people are anticipating the next release. They want more. That's awesome because I have a lot more to give you.

Explanation: Originally in Last Human episode 3, we had the MC from Serenity visit with the MC in Last Human and bring Lili to him. I heard from enough people and thought enough about it myself to realize that wasn't the right move. In my effort to reduce the number of girls in Serenity, I thought moving Lili to LH would work. The answer to that was 'no'. Looking back on it, I regret doing that because Lili really belongs in Serenity now. She has ascended (Valkyrie), and she fits in nicely with the rest of the girls. Plus, she still has a major part to play in the endgame. But people get so pissed off when things like this happen... You have to bear in mind that these games are 'under development'. That means they are not finished and are ALWAYS subject to various changes and even rewrites as I try to perfect the final product.

Anyway, as a result of that, I rewrote the ending of LH episode 3, removing that whole Lili scenario. But we still meet up with the MC from Serenity. I also corrected an issue in episode 1 where there were no images during their walk through the space station to the Aurora (orbiting earth). I rendered those and placed them, as well as rewrote the dialogue just a bit and corrected a few grammar/spelling errors. Then I added episode images to mark the beginning of each episode starting with episode 2. The images are animated, simple, but I think they do exactly what I wanted them to do. With all that, I also added a very short "N2TheFire Games" logo animation at the opening of the game. It's short, 5 seconds. And you can click passed it. Finally, I added some color and movement in the background of the main menu screen. I think it looks a lot better.

With all those changes, I thought... why not go ahead and build/release it now? Screw it... that's what I did. It was NOT to drum up subscribers. I just thought that folks who really love Last Human would appreciate it. And from the responses I received, they did. Mission accomplished. I said it a hundred times... I'm not in this to get rich (if I were, I'd need to be doing this full time). If people can't or don't want to support me financially, I really am cool with that. The game is free, outside of supporters getting the beta releases first. I have a full-time job; I don't live off of this. I won't do what I did during my first releases of Serenity and change stuff for a few people who bitch about something. I'll tell the story I want to tell and if someone doesn't like it, cool. I have plenty of faithful fans and that's what makes me happy. If you support me financially, thank you for that. Your money mostly goes back into my work, and allows me to pay for music, sub modders and even other AVN devs that I like. It keeps me in this community.

Anyway, sorry I was rambling a bit there... Back to episode 4 work... and there is a LOT of it. One of my tasks this week was to rework the Aurora bridge interior. It's a great looking scene. The problem is that the scaling is just all over the place with that map. So, I had to manually edit the map itself. Specifically, the side workstations and the workstation directly behind the captain's chair. They were way too low. I managed to raise them. It came out great. I also needed to adjust the lighting in there and fix some leaks in the corners that were giving me grief because it seemed like every camera angle I used would 'see' them. I fixed all that shit too. Now... I completed that, shot some scenes and it came out great. Shut down my computer and went to bed - only to get up the next day, load the scene, and everything I had moved were now rotated 90 degrees in the opposite direction. Such is the life of an AVN dev. It only took me about 30 minutes to put everything back in position, but still a pain in the ass. I love that bridge, but that thing is going to make me lose my mind. There are enough bridge scenes in this episode that I already know I'm going to have to rotate those pieces every single time I reload those scenes. So when I am doing those, I plan to do as many scenes as I possibly can while I have the map loaded. One image attached to this post is a rendered scene preview from this episode, on the bridge.

And the other image, is Ecko. She's a half machine, half organic ancient Teldarian. What N2? More new characters??? YES. Why? Because a story needs characters and we're going to meet a lot of them as the Aurora warps through the universe. Ecko is the first. I introduced patrons to her last week and now letting the cat out of the bag. All of the characters we'll meet like this are side characters only. Some will have lewd scenes with MC and some will not. Some will have small parts/events in future episodes, and others will not. I want us to meet other weird alien women and hopefully I've written some unique stories for them. Anyway...

That's all for this week, boys and girls. I have a 3-day weekend and plan on using it to get as much done as I can (on the bridge scenes for sure). So, for the first time, I may render each scene group out of order. Have a great weekend, love you all, ...Fire