Life is Pain


Okay, headline is a bit melodramatic, but it's been a lot of struggling in the last month and a half.

Cutting Part of a Feature
So, bit of bad news first: After trying pretty much every reasonable thing I could come up with, I just can't find a way to handle positioning of long hair for the protagonist. If it needs to be moved at all, I just can't get the different color versions and the masks to line up properly, meaning far too much image editing time for each CG that requires it.

Honestly, the game is way overdue for some cutting back anyway, so I think I'm going to eliminate the longer hair lengths. It was an extra that people asked for early on, but it's already taken up too much time in trial and error, and I think it's probably best to drop it and press forward.

Next one that might get the axe is makeup. Really, I only planned on having this show up in close-ups, but I'm having trouble getting it to work alongside tanning. The image above demonstrates weirdness I was getting in my latest attempt. This mirror image was mostly working, but the tanned version of the makeup layer won't match the opacity of the rest of the layer. (On the plus side, the new eye colors were much easier than I expected!)

I've tried getting some help on the coding issue, to see if there's something I'm doing wrong, but help with this sort of thing isn't as easy to get as it used to be. Really, though, the effect is such a minor thing that I don't want to waste too much time trying to get it to work if it's going to keep being difficult.


Stuff That Hasn't Been Cut Yet
As you can see, I've been working a bit on graphics, and I'm hoping to have some more mirror images ready for the next big build.

After those, I want to move on to more CGs with the player character. Specifically, images for sex scenes. As I've been putting a lot of my energy into getting more events with sex involving the PC into the game, I'm sure most players would like to see their character's actual body in those events, rather than nothing or another place-holder image.

Speaking of those events: Part of that work involves making it so the PC can hook up with guests at the resort. Like everything else in the game, I'd like to have a bit of a random element to keep things interesting for replayabilty. This means the guests will have attributes that will change each time. There isn't any of that in the game just yet (it's far more likely that you'll just get a few static guests for a while), but I am laying some of the groundwork for it.

Like the PC, I'll be using a sort of layered-image approach for these characters, so they'll be built from mix-and-match parts. Hopefully they won't be quite to the same level of complexity, though. Instead, I'm looking at a set of body types and different heads for each skin type.
(I'm just thinking "out loud" at this point, but as these guests are supposed to have varying levels of attractiveness, I might do some player polls and let the players rank them for me...)


Samples
Gotta give a little something back to my backers (and, also, Patreon forbids "implied nudity" in public posts), so samples of what I'm working are available in a special restricted post: (Here on Patreon and here on SubscribeStar.)


Life...Don't Talk to Me About Life...
I saved this section for the end for people who aren't interested in personal updates. Game development frustrations aside, I'm still struggling a bit with health issues. In general, stress takes a much bigger toll on me than it used to, so I find I can't push myself as hard as I used to.

Fortunately, the holidays mean time away from the day job, which has traditionally been good for Interns development. Hopefully that will be the case for this year.