General Update #25

Yup, I'm on Subscribestar now thanks to some questionable decisions by Patreon on the behalf of payment processors that really have no business dictating what is and isn't allowed.

But welcome to another General Update! Well, the first here, but still. I didn't want to post anything on April 1st just in case, so it's a day late.

Last month saw the inclusion of three new enemies and 9 new H-anims to the game, and it's getting to the point now where there are quite a lot of H-anims to find throughout what is currently available for the game.

That being said, here's the plan for the coming month.

The priority for April is to get a Gallery function implemented into the game. The Gallery mode will be exclusive to the MainBuild. The Gallery will feature every H-animation currently in the game, and you won't need to unlock it. The reasoning for this is that there is quite a large amount of people that would rather just see the animations, and if I make it so you had to unlock them then the only thing that'd result in is people trading save files. Since the game is going through big changes due to still being early in development a reliance on save files isn't going to be great, so instead of giving people a headache with that I'd rather just keep the Gallery scene unlocked by default for those that just want that kind of content immediately.

The secondary priority for April is to try get some kind of Death feature functioning. Now, as much as I'd love to be able to give a detailed and nice gameover CG or the like, I'm simply not yet confident enough in my art to be able to do it justice. Currently the main idea is to have death result in being locked into an endless downed state, vulnerable to H-scenes, until the Player decides to respawn in a save room. You won't have to reload anything, so progress will be kept, but you will have to at least walk back to where you were. I think for now this is a good compromise for not punishing the player too harshly for being defeated, and in the future Death will likely be revisited for GameOvers and such.

If these two priorities are completed relatively quickly I'll see to trying to implement some kind of tutorial, as there are a number of people who are often left asking if there's any kind of goal to complete, or even just how the game works. A tutorial may help with this, but it may also include other foundational systems I'll eventually need to implement either way like some manner of cutscene function, for both tutorial, story, and dialogue with NPCs.

There is of course always a lot more planned, bug fixes included, but for the time being this is what'll be getting worked on. There's been a few mention of stuff like keybinds and the like, and I do want to include those at some point along with other options for volume and resolution and the sort, but as mentioned before this is all a first time thing for me. If ever you find yourself asking 'why is X like this?' it's either because it's not finished or simply because I haven't taken the time to figure out how to do it yet. If I want to work on a new system the first thing I do is research how other games did it, along with looking at various examples on youtube and the sort.

That's all for now. As ever, a big thank you to the supporters!