Game Update #36

Hello all! I hope you like the gratuitous go-go boy attached to this post. His only role in the Club Update is looking pretty in the background, but these images scroll by kind of fast in the game itself, and I need everyone to get a good look at dat ass 😂

Anyway! BIG ANNOUNCEMENT - Junior, Senior, & Graduate early access to the Club Update is coming in ONE WEEK. That means Sophomores will have early access on July 31st!

It's been a quiet few weeks since I've been in crunch-mode, and I still have some more to wrap up before I share this with you all. But we're finally coming in for a landing after a very, very long flight.

A quick rundown of the game's status:

Writing

I have some tiny scenes to insert to clean up interactivity. These are things like acknowledging that you met a character in, say, Alex's story path if you earlier met that character via another story path. Basically odds and ends.

Art

I finished my biggest piece this morning, the scene where the go-go boy appears. When you first enter the club there's a big pan through the first floor to give you an idea of the space and how many people there are, much like when you enter orientation on Day 1. 

This image took several days dedicated just to making it, as it's made up of three detailed wide-shot images stitched together. All together it shows 50 unique characters. Around half of those characters are near the camera and needed to be in focus, and only 7 already had character models detailed enough to be put front and center. 

It was a lot of last minute work to create all of the new background characters, but I really like how the image turned out, even if just because it gave me an excuse to show off some more hot guys 😂

This was one of the final images I needed for the game. There are a few more full scenes to make and some other stray images, but nothing nearly as large or complex as the pan through the club. My graphics card will soon get some time to cool off!

Coding

This is the bulk of the work left, mostly in testing. Up until now I haven't been very methodical when testing - I ran through menu choices a bunch, and that was usually fine. But this update ended up doing callbacks to a lot more choice flags than any of the rest of the game, and each different flag means a different possible path through the night. For instance, I need to do a run-through where you propositioned Will earlier in the day and another where you didn't, and that encompasses the entire night since that flag comes up often... but only if you make certain choices during the night, meaning lots of alternate branches to check.

This complexity is how it's going to be for the game from now on, so I decided to figure out how to test quicker and smarter. I did this by going through all the code for the Club Update, noting where new and old flags were created and referenced, while also charting a course for each story path based on where the menu sends you in new directions.

Knowing exactly where a specific flag is referenced means I only have to test up to that point and no further - which is obvious in retrospect, but hey, I'm still relatively new to this whole coding thing! Moving forward I'll keep track of all of this while I code instead of after the fact, which will save even more time. A good lesson to learn sooner than later.

After such a long wait, I want your playthroughs of the new content to go as smoothly as I can make it. I'm spending a lot of time on this part, but I think it's worth the effort.

With all that out of the way, I want to share some fun stuff!

Fan Art

The game got its very first piece of fan art, and it's so awesome that I had to share it here! CallmeA created this piece imagining Matt in bara form, and I love it a lot. Check them out @CallmeA18 on Twitter and Black0Pumpkin on DeviantArt for more of their work!

Instagram

And I've been making some non-game art of my own over on Instagram. I've posted some Instagram-friendly thirst traps of guys like Will, Leo, & Marco. I'll be posting more images there in the future as well as use the page for updates on the game. If you'd like to follow me there for more of this content, I'm @freshmenvn!

Looking Ahead

Patreon has a lot of content coming at the back end of July, but I think delaying some things to share the game itself was probably the best idea 😉 Aside from early access, we've also got this month's Guy Gallery and Bonus Gallery coming later this month, plus the first Behind the Scenes post. August will bring even more, but I'll save that for the next game status update.

That's what I've got today! I hope you're as excited as I am - I can't wait to release this new update into the wild at long last 🙂