Another Monthly Report


Hi, guys! I hope everyone's doing great.

This month was filled with work more than usual. I took a couple of jobs on the side to improve my financial situation and I tried to keep up with development progress of the games as well. Also, I took first two weeks of December to work on TDLT, cause I grew tired of ERO Unit and it's a good practise to switch between works, in order to keep the passion going.

It worries me how you guys are taking my one and half updates per month. I don't know how to do this differently right now. Preparing an informing Patreon post, with images and all, takes hours, sometimes half of a day. I'm in a place where I don't want to waste time on sleep even, in order to be in time with everything I do. There's too much work. My life now is basicly - I woke up, work till 2-4 AM and go to sleep. There's a little time for anything else.

I'm not writing a crunch post, I'm trying to explain that I'm devoted to this thing, but other than developing games I have things to pay for. If I don't post for a while that dosen't mean that I'm slacking, it's means that I'm working like insane. And I want to put precious hours into work instead.

I know it's a shit way to handle Patreon (or SubscribeStar) page. I tried to find ways to do it rapidly instead, to adjust updates for my work style in some way. That's why I tryed Trello and that Worksheet widjet. I was thinking to start Discord Server and just post screenshots there or something to show that work is going. But like the other options it has dissadvantage that it's not Patreon. Of course everything should be posted here first. Maybe I should start posting little "proof of life" posts here that doesn't take time at all. But making posts smaller feels unfair. I don't know, I gotta think about it.

In future, when I finally release the games, I'm sure more people will join to be Patrons and I won't be depended on taking jobs on the side, and I finally could normalize my schedule to work and post stuff like a normal person. But until then, we gotta get through this period. 


Now to the usual. I didn't post since 1st December, so I'll make up for that by sharing a bunch of TDLT updates. ERO Unit is doing great, the game is about to go on it's final stages of development, I added a lot of tasty stuff and that's all I'll share for now in order to not to spoil it.


- Clothes changing feature for girls. I've read about this request a few times. That was understandable, it's a usual feature in porn games, and now we're joined to the custom. 

I want to give a huge props to programmer I worked with on that thing. I won't bore you with specifics, if you're interested, ask in comments what is so tricky about combining two images of a body and a face in this engine, I'll explain. The guy had to invent a solution to go around the engine's programming language limitations in order to made this thing work smoothly.

You can find clothes for girls to buy in shops with this sign:
Changing clothes will be avaliable through dialogue options:

For convenience, choosing clothes will be accompanied with the window on the side, showing you the dresses. Girls will agree to change after you'll corupt them enough. Making a girl to change into any outfit you bougth will raise your Dark Lord's reputation (more about it follows). After you made a girl to change once, you can change her into whatever, the gained rep will stay.

A link on a GIF with animation, showing the changing clothes process (NSFW): LINK 

- Lockpicking feature. In the next build you'll encounter chests, a lot of houses in Corona's capital with loot to steal, importants rooms and so on. So having half of that locked makes sence. 

I looked for some solution that doing lockpicking system in the way Bethesda's Fallout series and Skyrim does it. It looks like lockpicking, and it intuitevly easy to understand. Coding this thing from zero was an emergency option, but I got lucky and I found one. It had some flaws, but nothing that couldn't be fixed.

It was redrawn from this
to this
Changes that was made will explain how to use it: Mouse support was added, it opens and closes faster - now you can lockpick very quickly, like in Bethesda's games. Game's walking screen dosen't fade in dark completley.  If you broke a lockpick, you don't exit the mini-game, you get another lockpick if you have a spare. And every lock has it's own position for a lockpick to break the lock, instead of randomizing it each time you re-enter the mini-game.

You can find lockpicks in shops. Better have a lot of spare, since there will be a lot of locks to pick.


- Supporting window, during dialogues. Originally this thing was made for displaying stuff that is moved to Affinity interface now. Now it's important part of gameplay. It displays supporting information, like amount of required items that a character accepts, requirements to use an option you highlighted, gold when buying something, amount of dark energy, e.t.c:
Also, it will inform you about requirements to unlock quests. Like for characters who don't trust people like Hades, for example:
- Beside unlocking quests, Dark Lord's Reputation should be gained to have goodwill from some NPCs in general. To raise your rep you need to corrupt girls and complete certain side quests. Also your rep significantly highers by buying specific establishments in the capital. 

In plans for future builds (or for the next build, if I'll manage to work on Dark Lord's manor thoroughly enough), reputation can be raised by improving your manor, by collecting artifacts and by filling your treasure room with gold.

Let's talk about battle improvements.

- We have new depiction of subtracted HP.  In the last build we had this:
Covering sprites with huge numbers dosen't seem like the best way to do it. Now it's replaced by this:
- New solutions for speeding up the walkthrough. 

* If there will be a need to load a game and go through cut-scenes or dialogues you've seen already, you can skip it by higlthy speeding it up, by holding action button on mouse (or keyboard or controller), or by holding Shift. This feature partly was in the last build, but now it's debugged and works on everything that is not UI.

* You can call menu, save and load during the dialogues or dialogues options now, like in Visual Novel genre games. It'll help with long dialogues, where it's easy to mess up with wrong choices (like recruting Lola scene, for example).

* For people who said that battles takes too long, I added this button:
Which speeds up battles. Here's a short animation to demonstrate the feature:
The button will stay pressed through all battles, until you turn it off whenever you wish. The feature is handy if you're up to clean a map filled with enemies quickly. If you will prefer to stick to the faster speed - don't worry about dialogues during battles - they won't be affected. Also, like with cut-scenes and dialogues, I kept the option to speedup battles, by pressing Shift or holding action button.

I also changed animation that runs when you start a battle. Now it's simply goes through fade out and fade in animatiions. To escape overused default animation that is almost on every game using this engine.

As you may notice, I'm aiming to make the game as comfortable and responsive as I can. So it would be easy to navigate in functional that the game gives. So a lot of the features are targeted on giving you the feel of sorta owning the gameplay.

Aright, that's it for today's update. In order to provide lewdness, here's a doodle of Raps:
And a link on her NSFW doodles:  LINK

 Till the next update. Happy New Year, guys!