WEEKLY POST - June 8th 2025 - 1st NSFW FMG animation + backgrounds!

First order of business:

Hello everybody! First off, I want to say thanks to all the people who saw me panic over the sub-numbers last week and who managed to improve the situation just in time to make sure that I could safely continue this adventure at least another month.

It's also thanks to these cool people who even came to discuss on Discord that I remain motivated and driven.

Bonus Content Drop where?!

Next, I want to apologize to the Hobz & Gobz as I have no Bonus Content Drop this week. The reason why is that I think at this junction, the best thing I can do for the project and the Patreon is to focus on the game and make sure that everybody who's part of a Tier gets to see some progress as, coincidentally, I start getting into the part of development where I'll make NSFW FMG sprites and animations.
So yeah, bad news, no Bonus Content Drop. Good news, NSFW FMG animations are coming.

I hope that sounds fair to you all and that you'll forgive me for that. It's super hard for me to guess in advance how many people will see this and think "Time for me to cancel my membership without answering the exit survey, because fuck him". It's like playing Poker with invisible mute players who have all the Aces.
Plus, I'm terrible at Poker. Gotta love extra handicaps.

New version classification:

People have pointed out several times that it feels wrong for the current version of my game to be referred to as V1.0. They're right. The reason why that is stems from Dating Elena originally not being meant to be something I would expand, so when I started coming-up with version names, I started with V0.8.

Anyway, in future posts, the initial V1.0 release will be downgraded to V0.1. What I used to call V1.1 (the work-in-progress update) will now be called V0.2.
I won't re-upload the game on Itch with that new classification just for that, so the change will only be effective there once I'm done with V0.2.

First NSFW Animation:

Gotta love Patreon for not giving me any option to post a video that doesn't come from Vimeo or Youtube because my content is oriented towards 18+. Of course I can't take the risk of posting NSFW stuff on either Youtube or Vimeo sooo... yeah. The best I can do is to show you the GIF version of my animation, then put a link to download the higher quality video version aaaaall the way down at the bottom of this page in the attached files.

I'm really happy with how it turned out. I'm also quite happy with the new style I used for the borders of the frame, which looks cooler, more in-line with the UI I've designed near the end of development of the initial release. It's also much more optimized that the old style where I hadn't yet thought of baking the border frames IN the animation.

There's only one animation this week because making those is very intensive and I don't wanna burn-out while churning them one by one the same way I did when making the original animations last year. That nearly broke me.

Assets updates:

"Ok so if you only made one FMG animation, what else did you do this week, you lazy bum?!"

I'm glad you asked. First, I've added a few new icons (used for items, topics, travel-map locations) and updated some older ones.

The updated ones include the injection-gun which used to say "GobLabs", Elena's shirt which had the old Yare Yare Daze refererence, and the portraits for Alex, Elena, Johan and the Neighbor (whom I plan to add in Chapter 2). Then, he will probably get another re-design, we'll see.
You might notice new icons like the serum canister, the Bionovalis logo, the Goddess Bia, the bottle of blue hair dye, where I re-used the joke-parody-brand Beautiful Bitches. I wanna do something with this to explain why Elena has the hair-color she does. I want to add a few more related to the conversation with Elena, to deepen her character. I have plans.

The other big chunk of the week was spent on re-working the backgrounds. I've covered a comparison of the old backgrounds and the new version in the Youtube video at the top of the post, but in case you hate the sound of my voice, I'll do a quick recap of the changes below.

A key change is that for those with alternate versions, I've made sure to make them in a way that is better optimized in terms of file-size. No need to have the full background with the alternate bit if I can just have the alternate bit on a transparent background and composite it directly in-game over the normal background.
Don't understand what I just wrote? Don't worry about it. The point is that it's better.

Elena's Street:

The background of Elena's street was done earlier today. I re-did it for 2 main reasons. First, the old version only had 2 floors, which is... not really a thing, to my knowledge, it big cities. The other big thing was that the architecture had a tendency to be MC-Escher-esque with impossible shapes. This new background looks more believable.

Hallway to Elena's apartment:

Fun-fact: way back, like nearly a year ago, the Hallway background was designed to be the main menu screen. That why when you look at the old one, there's a bit of shadow to the left. That's where the menu buttons were meant to be.
So while I was there, I added the door of the creepy neighbor, and in Chapter 2, I'll be able to have a thing where his door opens and he shows up to chat (and maybe get intimidated by the enhanced Elena).
Fun-fact 2: the number of my apartment IRL is n°9. It's not a random choice. Now you know.

The kitchen:

I've been meaning to make some changes to this background because the tiles in the back were a total mess and the perspective around the oven hood made no sense. I still have a couple of things I want to fix, but nothing more than a 30 min job.
Nothing much else to say for this one, really.

The bathroom:

Ok now this one, I felt like I HAD to fix things. There was a random weird plant on the sink, the bottom of the shower was all twisty, some lines were nonesensical. I just couldn't look at the old version of this background without my eyes drifting towards that vertical line between the towel and the mirror and how it was broken below the sink.
While I did some fixes, I also added the bottle of hair-dye next to the shower, with the intent of making it an item you can look at.

The main room:

Here's the big one.
So, first, I moved everything slightly to the right to make space for the bathroom door.
I've then moved the bed to make space for the kitchen door. "Why is the kitchen door next to the bed, isn't it terrible Feng-shui?" - Man, I don't fucking know.
Point is, I wanted the Bathroom and Kitchen to be areas you could see in the scene-composition, to interact with them.

While I was there, I've been thinking for about 6 months about making a scene when I'll get to Chapter 2 where muscular Elena is sitting sexily on a couch in her apartment. I was initially considering making an alternate apartment background, on the other side of the room behind the player's field of vision... but then I thought I could instead prepare the terrain and make better use of the space I have here, instead of making a ton of backgrounds. That being said, when I do end-up making that couch scene, I will probably make a close-up background of the couch with Elena sitting on it like a queen.

I've also removed the moon from the night sky through the window, because it makes no sense for it to always be conveniently visible in the sky no matter which direction you're looking. Freakin' quantum moon. While I was there, I tried to have the cityscape look less like New York seen from the top of a skyscrapper.

I've also changed the paintings (in my mind, they're Displates, but I'll think of a legally-safe parody name later - maybe Unplate or Displaque, we'll see). I think it makes a bit more sense for a girl to have pictures of strong independent women from fiction/games. Actually, I should ask girls what they'd prefer to have, because they might actually prefer big guys like Geralt of Rivia...

Inspect this:

I plan to have more things for the player to look at during the Inspection sequence while Elena is undressing in the bathroom. Mainly the cityscape through the window and the video-game paintings.

I want to make sure that the player can piece-together a bit more info about Elena during that time.

Another thing that I'm likely going to work on, on which I might be working right now as you read these lines, would be a new preference feature you could turn ON or OFF (likely ON by default). When ON, it would show what's interactive during Inspection sequences with the little cursor icons (the eye, the gears, the pick-up hand...), in case you don't wanna slide your mouse all over the screen.

EDIT: Well, I wasn't expecting to have this done before even posting the weekly post, but after 4-ish hours of work, I made it work. Eh, what do you know, I even surprise myself when I'm powered by a few cans of Monster Energy Drink (Mango Loco is the best flavor, change my mind if you can - spoiler : you can't).

So anyway, now, by default, Inspection sequences will have those little icons placed with care so as to not hide the objects, but visible enough to catch your eye.

Last thing I wanna touch-up next-week before doing more FMG animations would be to re-work the eyes of Johan in his sprite, because I HATE how uncanny-valley they look, it makes my skin crawl whenever I look at him, and there's no way for me to let this slide. I'm ashamed it took me so long to figure out what was wrong with them, too.

Alright, that's it for this week, I think it's been a productive week. I hope this is enough for you guys. Good news, a whole bunch of puzzle pieces are starting to fit together, now.

Have a nice Sunday! Cheers!