Update - Ai as a maid

tl;dr - I've made a bunch of pics this week for random ideas while trying to get some PAT programming finished. Also, I've released the first public demo of PAT!

This week's images

I had a random idea this week, imagining that Ai turned up at the mansion door in PAL one day with no memory, but knew she was supposed to be Kenji's new maid. Here's a few images riffing on that idea, which I made while I was basically distracting myself from more important programming work I've been struggling with for PAT.

A note about these bent over poses: previously it wasn't easy for me to make these look any good. The models I use tend to look like a kind of flesh coloured hinge when bent over from that angle. I have, however, got a bit better at this and I've got a morph that can make it work sometimes, so I'll probably try to throw together similar shots in the future for PAT characters.

First public demo of PAT

I released PAT to the public for the first time! The reception has been pretty decent, so far, but the project still hasn't really broken out, so it needs a lot more public exposure. If you have the opportunity to share or upvote the game at any point, please do! It helps a lot, since the main thing my games lack is people paying them any attention.

I know that it's still quite early in development and there's not a hell of a lot in it yet, but obviously a lot is still coming. I can't really add loads of content until I've got the basic systems laid down for it, so I'm really, really keen to get the dating system in place so that I can start adding stuff. Speaking of which...

Programming stress

I've been trying all week to work on the dating system in PAT but it's tricky, especially because I don't know the engine all that well yet. Programming easy stuff is very easy, but more complex things don't work for reasons I can't necessarily fathom. The problem is that what I'm working on now is actually among the most complex stuff I'll need to do on the game, so I'd prefer to just leave it for later, but I can't really do that. These gameplay functions are the basic spine of the game and once they're in place I can easily build out the subsequent scenes and do all the story telling - it should be quite easy. I've just got this big hill to climb first before I get to the plateau.

This has been pretty stressful, especially with the anxiety about releasing the demo and hoping for a good public reception. Normally this job is fun and fairly stress-free, just less so in times like these. I really hope I'll be past this soon; we'll see.

There may be some new people getting this update since I released the PAT demo - hello! I do these updates weekly.

In any case, do you like the pictures and the idea of Ai as a maid? If you've just tried PAT for the first time, what did you think of it? Let me know in the comments!