0.38 Reflection and 0.39 Preview

Hello, perverts! Thank you so much for the support lately. Like I said in my last reflection, I get nervous when I have a dry spell, but your well-wishes with the last release helped a lot with regards to easing my worries.

There's another gap in Center of Attention patron polls going on right now. I've got a bit of a backlog of stuff to implement from those. However, if you're supporting me at $5, you continue to be welcome to request things, especially quick things like extra options in existing scenes or other topics of interest. I've been getting some useful requests from you lately and I appreciate it. Patrons at any level are welcome to give feedback, too, so please don't hold back because you don't feel like giving that much works for you.

Reflecting on Piercings and Webs

This felt like a big one! After a long time avoiding artwork, I ended up doing a whole bunch. In addition to piercings, I revised Theresa's lines in her default standing pose. It's subtle, but I think it does a better job now of making her hips read right. I also fixed an inconsistent coloring approach in her on-knees POV pose that made her look way too pink.

The addition of up to 14 new piercings to every pose raised an issue that had been building for a while. Theresa's art works like a paper doll; if you look under the game's game/images directory, you can see what they look like. It's a whole bunch of layers that get assembled together, and in my source files in Krita, a Photoshop-like application, each of those layers is composed of 2-5 sublayers for lines, flat colors, shading, and so on.

My old method for exporting all of that was to manually make one layer group visible at a time and export them one-by-one. That made the already-intimidating task of updating artwork also feel tedious, and I finally decided to do something about it. Krita has incorporated a Batch Exporter plugin that lets you export certain layers in an image all at once, if you tag the layer names with codes like "e=png t=false". However, those end up in a nested folder structure according to how the Krita file is organized, and Ren'Py, my programming tool, prefers flat image names that look like "theresa_knees_pov_pissover_mouthpool.png".

So I wrote my own tool to convert the nested folders Krita puts out to a format that matches what Ren'Py wants! Any programmers reading this will recognize that this is pretty simple work, but it took a bit of fiddling to get right. In the end, it's very worth it. I can now make whatever changes to a pose I want, do a few simple steps to export it, run the script, and copy the files over to my project without spending time doing tedious and error-prone busywork. I've attached the script to this post for anyone who's curious.

Artistic and technical stuff aside, I'm very happy to have piercings in the game. Piercings are kind of fundamentally hot, even if I'm a wuss about the idea of getting some myself, and it was very nice to add them to the game. I also always enjoy piss stuff, so writing a play scene about was pretty cool.

Next Release

The big feature I'm working on is the first graduation scene! This one is an orgy, as selected by a patron poll. I know there are folks who would prefer to keep Theresa to themselves, and that graduation experience is coming, but the first one will be a good old-fashioned sex party.

I've already written the initial intro scene and some of the party planning and invitations. Continuing my usual practice of including a subtle bit of sex ed in with my smut, I'm trying to take an approach that's in line with some of the play party experience I've learned in my own life. Sex with (relative) strangers in a public setting is super fucking hot, but it presents extra risks and challenges that can be mitigated with some simple techniques that are pretty hot in themselves.

And don't worry: you'll have the opportunity to invite someone who will add some solid weird erotic horror spice to the whole event. I'll leave it to you to figure out what I mean, and I hope you enjoy it.

Beyond the graduation event, I also want to keep adding night music scenes with the goal of having at least one scene per rank of Permissivity. I'll also probably add a sex scene with the one remaining major NPC who's been neglected: Pappy. They'll need some new art if you invite them to the party, so it's a good opportunity to fill the final hole in the NPC roster, if you know what I mean. I've also gotten requests for things including the ability to pierce the Professor, which is a smaller-scale feature that should be fun. I'm not sure which of the foregoing will end up in the very next release, but they should all be coming soon.

Thanks, as always, for your support and encouragement. You're always welcome to send me questions, comments, ideas, or things that got you off by commenting here, PMing me on Patreon, or writing: phanes@phanes.me