MNL Progress Report #117

Hey there, nudies! I am so, SO sorry for the extended delay. I didn't mean to take so long getting to you all, I promise. Just an extremely busy few weeks, and not just for me. Invertex actually suffered a power outage that damaged his computer and knocked him out of commission for a bit. Everything's been repaired and replaced now, but it was pretty worrying for a bit! As for me, I've been dealing with trying to sell this house I'm in, talking with banks, and preparing a big personal announcement that should be ready in the next couple weeks. It's been hectic as all heck. But now that things have settled down a bit, let's get right back into it!

We're prepping everything to get this opening area done, and that includes prettying things up a bit! One thing we decided to test was the image you see up at the top - shading! We weren't quite happy with Amber's self-shading giving her a kinda weird look, so we dialed that back a bit. A nice benefit to this as that shadows can now be casted on top of Amber, which looks really nice... though the downside is that she can't cast shadows herself. Just a weird compromise we have to make. I promise she's not a vampire! We did give her some little feet shadows so at least there's some marking that she's on the ground. It'll just have to do!

This opening area is going to have a couple of NPCs, as you saw with Freddy in a previous update. But we needed to streamline our rigging process for animations. It would take too long to hand-rig every single NPC, so Invertex whipped up a new program that generates rigs for the models with only minimal adjusting. It's not an automatic process and requires some tweaking, but it removes a LOT of the tedium for setting up animation controls. And with the same base rig being used across all our different characters, they should be able to share animations! The above GIF was a test to see how well this would work. It ain't perfect, but with just a small amount of tweaking, it can be!

But that's not all, either! Don't go turning your head and coughing just yet, because we've got a brand new character to debut! This one is actually an original design from our 3D modeler, Bear Festival! We gave him carte blanche to create a character, and... ta-da!

Presenting the town's healthcare practitioner! This doctor runs a clinic in downtown Culo Culo. She's a bit intimidating, or at the very least tries to be... but sadly, she's kind of a big dork. Bear put a lot of love into this one, and fought tooth and nail to keep her boobs as big as they ended up being. We still haven't quite decided on a name yet, but there's lots of potential for a big-boobed goth chuuni doctor!

The big push for this month is getting all of our NPCs and final props into this cafe zone, then attaching dialogue and cutscenes to our interactables to finally get this section done! Then we need to do it for the very brief section outside Amber's house, the lengthier, much less clothed scene inside her house, and then the demo is DONE! Full speed ahead! Let's go!

We'll also have another prequel comic page for you guys tomorrow! It came out VERY cute, and it's the start of a great new scene you're definitely not gonna want to miss! Here's just a one-panel preview of our nudie cutie waking up from a very relaxing nap...

That's all for today, though! Again, sorry for taking so long on this! And see you tomorrow with a new page!