Dev Diary #3

Good evening everyone! We're almost ready to publish new builds, so in the meantime, let's have a look back at our work throughout November.

Story

Not many significant developments have occurred since the previous dev diary with regards to the story content. We have edited and prepared the content we previously talked about for implementation, and you should hopefully see it by the end of this week.

That being said, we have held a number of internal meetings in which our writers fleshed out some of the later themes in the game and their relation to the endings we have planned. There are so many juicy details that we sadly can't share as they would spoil quite a lot, but rest assured that you'll be taken on a rollercoaster ride as the story picks up pace later on.

Artwork

Also during one of said meetings, we made the tough decision (as described here) to stop commissioning illustrations from Lumix and have Rauch draw them instead. We also teased that we would show more details about how that turned out in this post.

To see whether this would work out, we asked Rauch to remake the first sex scene with Garreth. While the general poses in the pictures were already established by Lumix, pretty much every detail of the scenes has been redrawn in Rauch's own illustration style, and our entire team is very happy with the results!

Here is one of the variations of that scene:

Original variation by Lumix

The same variation remade by Rauch

There will always be some style differences, especially given that this was also Lumix's first scene render for the game. But overall, Rauch's remake isn't just really well drawn, it also shows off his incredible talent, as he can create quality NSFW artwork despite it not being his usual focus.

These new illustrations should also flow much better with the rest of the game's background art, now that it's all made by the same artist. While Lumix is a very talented artist as well, her style changed quite a lot since we first commissioned her. Consistency in style is key for long term projects. That's also the main reason why we revised our character sprite art multiple times, as Folsky bought himself better tools, became more experienced in his work and better understood the game's requirements.

And all of this is without mentioning the incredible turnaround time of under 2 weeks! This is huge, it means we can now have far better control over our planning, and can more easily achieve the goals we had planned for the character dating content and number of sex scenes in the game. And we can do all of this at a fraction of the cost. While we will naturally compensate Rauch for his work, it will still be far less expensive than commissioning Lumix while still looking fantastic!

But enough about that, we also had Folsky successfully finish the batch of 8 expressions for Yarin which we previously showed off. This time, we also ensured that there is proper layering for them (there is a nude variant for each, and there will likely be more clothing options for them made if/when needed) and we made higher resolution versions internally.

Folsky will now be creating more expressions, following our internal assessments for character expressions. All the illustrations and side sprites should be available in the next release too, replacing the former art.

Audio

Samples meanwhile focused on composing tracks for the 6th day of the story. One of these tracks has a very grungy feel to it, complemented by a surfer guitar vibe. The other has a more relaxed and melancholic melody and some soothing drums. We attached both of them to this post, so feel free to listen in and tell us what you think.

Programming

On the programming side, Wattson's been mainly working to implement all the new content. Unfortunately, he has a lot on his plate, and wasn't able to finish this before the 1st of the month. The update should drop as soon as he is done implementing and testing everything. He also looked through the audio code and potentially fixed a prominent bug that was causing sounds to only play 50% of the time when loading and reloading save files.

We'll have lots of work ahead of ourselves after we release the next version, but rest assured that we'll be bringing you the highlights of each month as we go along.