Hey, folks! Hope you’re all well this week. I had a rough couple of days, further straining my already wonky arm at my day job. But, I can’t complain too much.

To quickly address the elephant in the room: I’d planned to get a new alpha out at the beginning of this week, and that obviously didn’t happen. The day job wasn’t cooperating with my attempts to edit dialogue and code, or place images. But, I’m back on track now. Well, as on-track as I ever am.

Over the last two days I finished placing variables and images for most of the update, as well as cleaning up dialogue and narration that was a little too ‘first-draft.’ I also discovered a few lines that I wanted to support with new renders and got those done. I also stumbled across a whole section that I’d just forgotten to set images for, and rectified that. Finally, I made two changes just to open up the options for players a bit. I’ll keep one a secret for now, but I had to do a single new image and 30~ lines of coding and dialogue, to basically add a whole alternate scene for all players on all paths. Well worth it, I think.

The other thing I did was add a bit where you could become acquainted with Indigo, a compensated companion who bears a striking resemblance to Gabby, who briefly appeared in Season 1. She returns in the upcoming first chapter of Season 2, and is an option for potential threesome scenes – as some may have gathered from recent image teases. Given that she appeared wayyyy back in Chapter 3, and a lot of people may have skipped meeting her in favor of a scene with Ashe or Jun, I felt it’d be a bit burdensome to wall her content off behind that one, seemingly unimportant decision. So now you’ll have some other ways to get that content, without needing to skip through nine seasons and change. And all it cost me was a render and a few lines of dialogue.

(See, I may allow scope creep, but I’m getting smarter about it!)

My goal is to spend tomorrow placing all my remaining images (of which there are something like 550) after which the new build will be all but done. I still need to do the ‘outro’ scenes that end Gabby’s content, but I think I’ll only need 30-50 images for that.

So, bear with me for a few more days, and I’ll hopefully have something fun for everyone this weekend. I greatly appreciate everyone’s patience. My Discord regulars love to rib me about my inability to set realistic schedules, and while I’m very self-deprecating in this regard, I really can’t express enough how much I want this update to be finished.

Until next time, take care of yourselves – and thank you for your support!

Hey, folks! Hope you're all having a great week so far.

Progress continues, and Gabby's love and friendship paths are mostly rendered now. Hallelujah. I still need to do the outro for each scene, but the setup and ero bits are done, which were the most substantial part. Still, another 50ish renders I think, and I'll be done there. For a little too-hot-for-public-posts teaser, you can take a look at Gabby's ero scene here.

After that, the task remains to finish coding everything, and touch up some dialogue. I've got this fun habit of writing a crappy line of narration or dialogue, and then putting a note next to it like: "## << this sucks fix it later you dumb-dumb" And as my weariness with the update grew, so too did the number of lines like that. :D Still, none of that should be too demanding.

The coding stuff will be slightly more annoying, but hopefully not too bad. I'm adding some features that have been previously requested, including stuff like a revamped save naming feature (and the ability to turn it off), the ability to navigate save/load by ten pages at a time, the ability to name your Season 1 export files, etc. These have all been tested in a test game file, but they still need to be implemented in the actual game. But I don't foresee any problems there.

So, with that in mind I'm working to have the alpha for Ch14 done by this upcoming Monday, the 18th. If I'm speedy, I'll have it out the day before.  So, that's that! I'm approaching the finish line, and I just need to avoid rolling my ankle -- metaphorically speaking. 

Finally, in tangential news.. I had a supporter reach out a few weeks ago, inquiring about making a 3D mousepad using some existing art of Risa. I told him to hang tight, and I'd make him some custom stuff that might work better. So, I did a couple of renders, and then also ran them through ChatGPT to create stylized 2D versions. Which you can see below!

As much as I enjoy the Daz style, I just felt like 2D art would serve this kind of thing better. And while I wouldn't want to use AI art in an official product, I felt like it'd be nice for a prototype. So, I hooked him up and told him to let me know what the final result looked like. And check out what he sent me, today!

How cool is that?!

Alright, I'll leave you with that today. But as always, take care of yourselves -- and thank you for your support!