Progress Update: February 2024

Helloooooooo. Hi. Hi. Let's chat.

It's been a pretty standard month for writing. I'm focused on completing the scenes I added last month (they all end in porn; surprise). It's surprisingly tiresome writing five sex scenes one after the other, it turns out. It's just difficult making them all feel distinct. But anyway, that's my problem, not yours.

Beyond that, work continues on the new UI, but much more excitingly, Tanu and I have worked out a roadmap for the art for this year. It's been slower going than either of us wanted, but she's remained dedicated to the project despite life challenges, and I'm super appreciative of that. Every time I see new art from her I'm reminded how talented she is. You've seen the Eshu design, of course, and next up are the painted dog twins Advik and Viraj. When those are done, that completes the designs of all the characters that she's doing; Inkanyamba will be outstanding, but I'm still on the hunt for an artist to deliver on that design for me. But that doesn't need to happen urgently because we've got almost all of them done so next up is SPRITES \o/.

Sprites will be approached reasonably, with the understanding that it's going to take a lot of time to finish them all. The estimate for now is one month per character. I am being quite aggressive with my initial goals: 2-3 poses each, 2-3 outfits, and approximately ten emotes each. The viewpoints will be the same 3/4ths ones from the character design sheets; there may be one or two that are more face-on, but most won't be. The outfits will be largely the ones you've seen in the character design sheets, barring characters with uniforms who will also receive a casual outfit. All characters will of course have a nude "outfit", with appropriate dick states (sheathed, flaccid and erect, anatomy dependent). There will be no option for alternative penises. I probably won't do a SFW mode either; maybe after release if I have the energy. However, if it turns out to be technically viable once I've put the sprites in, I'll definitely add an option to override the outfit so you can have all characters be nude all the time. The CGs and text won't match up, of course, but that's not the point. PENISES. Though I'll likely set it up that you need to hit certain points in the game to unlock this ability for certain characters? I think it'll be fun to slowly unlock a full playthrough of totally naked characters instead of just flipping a switch to do it from the start :) So like Deathloop, but with dicks. Dickloop? Dickloop.

I will scale these ambitions down (or up!) once we've done some experiments to see just how much work it is for her. The finances are decent thanks to all your ongoing support, and I also have my own contributions that I'm ready to throw at her to bring my ambitions to life. All the sprites will be done as linework initially; no colouring or shading. This will let Tanu work through all the sprites for all the characters first, and then make changes once she's finished to ensure that there's no stylistic drift over the year+ it'll take to do them all before she does final colouring and shading. What's great is that I can put the sketches into the engine already, and then just drop in the final versions at a later date. So when you first see sprites, it'll just be lines. Very attractive lines, but lines.

The work to put them in will mean it'll be time for me to start writing my Sprite Put In Game Make Easier system (name subject to change) which will let me load up the game in a custom player and step through it line by line, choosing the emotes, outfits and positions from a visual wardrobe as I go. It'll drastically speed up and simplify the process of spritifying the game, but it will take a few months to write in the first place. I'll begin that once I've gotten the first sprites.

I'll post the sprites to Patreon as I get them, of course, and you will be strongly encouraged to comment if you think a particular emotion could be better (or different) for a given character. I'm currently working through all of them and documenting the particular emotions each one will have; perhaps those lists are something people would enjoy me posting to Patreon so they can comment if they feel their favourite characters should have a different set? Comment and let me know.

That all ended up longer than I thought, but yeah. I'm excited for what's to come :) Sprites are, unfortunately, something that the majority of players expect before they'll play a VN. While I haven't personally worried about not having them, I do feel that LOTM's quality and depth of writing can win many more over to enjoying it, if they could just look past the lack of sprites. So putting them in will be a big step to those people hopefully discovering the game and enjoying it. Exciting times :)

Chat again soon,

Zaggy