The past week has been a lot of fun; I have done a few renders but not for the story, worked on code and GUI elements involving a lot of photoshop, and had some help from my senpai's...

I haven't been counting the weeks, but I reckon it's not far from 8 weeks since I did anything; hell, my last post was on 29th September. There had been news of me potentially working away for about 16 weeks and that I would need to focus on Story development as I couldn't take my rig with me. So after a nice 600-mile round trip and some clerical errors, I am back home. I was in a state of limbo until the last two weeks, and I spent a week catching up on all the AVNs I play that had been released and even played a few new ones.

I have to say this: I'm not sure if Drifty would read my blogs, but their game Leap of Faith is outstanding, and I've said as much on their discord. I'm not going to write any spoilers here; there was so much I liked about this story. The first part was the actual story, I did come for the horny, but the story won me over 1 billion per cent! Every character was so well defined, and the different sub-plots depending on your 'girl' were well written and suited the characters perfectly every time. The story touched on some dark themes that some people might struggle with, so please be careful; Dirfty does provide a warning. Next is the imagery and animations, and I have to say some of the best I've seen. I found these REALLY inspiring and would LOVE to have animations like these in PoD. You also see so many custom assets created by "the world-renowned Architect" Wobble, I mean Wibble. As you all will know, several months ago, I started to dabble in set assets, so I know these can be tricky to implement, and the bigger they are, the longer they take, so hats off to you, Wibble. What brings all this together is the soundtrack, my god, it's brilliant; I found myself sitting on the main menu just flicking through the song playlist for an hour or so. I like so much more to Leap of Faith, but this is supposed to be my DevBlog, not a cross-promotion piece.

Back to why you guys are reading this.

This week has been the first week I've sat behind my PC and worked actively on PoD. I've posted a ton to discord this week with sneak peeks, previews and other renders, so hopefully, you have seen the progress and like what you see.

My biggest challenge is always coding; I don't know much about it. But I know I'm good at taking a block of working code and tweaking it to my needs as I can figure out what it's doing. Thank you, VBA, for making this possible; without you, I'd be up shit creek without the proverbial paddle. My in-game custom screen is going well. I managed to get the options screen included, tweaked the bio screens, added some info, and added placeholders for a Replay screen and gallery screen. These last two screens have a deliberate error message that says it's reporting you to your systems administrator and provides your actual date and time of access and your character user ID.

Oh, yeah, I have replaced the cutesy-style bars with ones that match the overall theme of PoD and created a character plate. So it now looks like a traditional RPG, except your resources aren't HP, MP & SP; they're Hornyness, Lust & Climax. What I can't get to work for the life of me is getting the bars to fill up from right-to-left. They only seem to fill left-to-right no matter what I do, but they work and look good; that's what's important.

This character plate is also how you will access the in-game menu; click Nate's face, and it will open. The plate will have different visibility states to it so that in the PoD world, it's always on and, in Reality, is a hoverable item. I am looking to incorporate a changing mood into the image displayed on the plate. So you'll visually see when Nates is happy, angry, sad etc., ren'py has a built-in for this, so I need to figure it out and then customise the shit out of it because what I want is never just simple.

Shit, I went off track there. As I was saying, coding is my biggest challenge. I am fortunate enough that I have some good friends, fellow devs with who I regularly jump into streams with, and they have other good friends who support them. Whilst chilling with 13 Games working on everything I mentioned above, whilst he was finalising the Chapter 2 beta of Our Island (soo good), Shaddy joined. Shaddy was working on the coding for the replay screen, so I took advantage. I was getting frustrated as fuck. Honestly, code can suck a bag of dicks sometimes. Shaddy, the martyr he is, offered me some pointers and fixed some code for me, which inevitably triggered his OCD. My code was a shit show and inefficient. Muahahaha, my evil plan is working. Shaddy kindly worked on my code once he'd finished with the OI replay screen, and the next night we went through the changes and troubleshot it with a few others until we got a nice slick, easy to manage and appended to code. Honestly, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and hope to trigger your OCD very shortly *devilish grin*.

O yeah! I did some tweaking to Sarah's office; it's now her private home with an office, which was the original intent. Again 13 came to my rescue here. As I was shit-talking and airing my frustrations, he said: "hey, have you ever used the geometry editor?" BOOM! Problem solved! We got there in the end only after he re-figured how to add holes to geometry. Once he figured it out, I was let loose. You will never see the external views at the front of the residence because it's a botched job. I may make a custom set for this, but that's probably way into the future. Anywhooo, After getting the hole cut and add to add a new primitive and then cut a hole in that to fill the bigger hole I had cut for the small hole I needed. Yeah, I know that doesn't make sense, except it does…polygons; need I say more? Yes! Okay. We like low-poly assets because the lower the poly count, the less VRAM is required to render. Unfortunately, this asset was a very low-poly one, and when you use the Geometry Editor to cut, you need polygons to remove and low-poly means each polygon is MUCH bigger! Okay, you should now be able to follow that weirdly illogical logic I threw out a few sentences back. After some other tweaks, my new opening looks like it was always there; yay!

Other than that I didn’t do much, apart from playing the Beta of Our Island’s second chapter. The story is shaping up very nicely, and now I have to wait again for more.

Snowy

My Linktree: https://linktr.ee/postboned_games