Progress Report

Phew, what a week this has been. It's been very productive for Long Live the Princess, that's for sure. 

Last weekend, I finished up the gallery feature, at least when it comes to scene replays. When 0.12 is released, you'll be able to replay any sex scene you've come across in the game (this will not be retroactive for all scenes for technical reasons. You might have to reload old saves or start over to get access to specific scenes that you've already seen). You will also be able to configure these scenes where applicable, for example by choosing a costume for Belle or deciding whether or not a girl is shaved. One of the neatest things about this new feature is that it allows players to quickly see if they've missed any content in an update. Any scenes you have yet to see will be shown as a heavily blurred thumbnail with a padlock on it, organized by girl. So, if you, say, missed a Primrose sex scene, you'll be able to tell.

Speaking of Primrose, that's who I've been focusing on this week, and that's who I'll be focusing on for the rest of the month. I'm doing something I haven't done yet in this game, and that is to bring a romance path to its conclusion. Your choices up to this point will come to a head in this update. What will the nature of your relationship with Primrose be, going into the end-game? There's more than one option here, each one with its own unique scenes and dialogue. I've had to make some changes to how Primrose's opinion of you is decided. As a result, any existing saves will work differently from a new game. The game will consider how you've been treating her since you first met her when deciding what options will be open to you in the end. These opinion changes haven't been tracked well enough until now, leaving existing saves lacking. It's not going to be a problem if you want to continue your existing save, but it means that the result you get might not be the one you'd get if you started over and did all the same actions again.

So far, I've rendered two new scenes for Primrose, and I'm far from done. There's a ton of writing for me to do to integrate these scenes into the game, but I'm going to try my hardest to make it before the end of the month. These scenes are a little problematic to render because of the environment in which they happen. I created this environment pretty early on in development, back when I was still an amateur with the tools I'm using. The result is that these scenes are incredibly demanding of my hardware. Every single image takes almost two full hours to render. It can be frustrating to work with, but it is what it is, and I just have to force myself through it. This is part of the reason why I hope we reach the $5000 goal. :)

Keep in mind that just because I say we're entering the conclusion of Primrose's romance path, that doesn't mean that Primrose's story is concluded. She still has a secret we haven't revealed, and there will be more scenes added as we keep moving forward. It's just her romance path that concludes in this update. 

Oh, and lest I forget: Looks like the Fairy Queen scene won the popularity contest in the poll we did. I can't say I'm surprised. That scene is my favorite as well. Still, it's fascinating and educational for me to see what scenes people are drawn to the most. I'll be sure to take these results with me as I continue developing the game.

Anyway, it's back to work for me. I've got a lot of renders to churn out over the coming two weeks. There's no time to waste.

Until next time!