re:Dreamer Alpha 0.12.0

Click here for the download links.

Sorry for the delay, folks! This is easily the largest update this silly little VN (well, not too "little" now) has ever had: 4.5 hours of stuff. Even working 10 hour days (many 12+ hours) with no weekends for about... 4 weeks now, I couldn't get to a good stopping point until now.

re:Dreamer (0.12.0) finally fixes one of the most glaring issues with the game: the start of the Keisuke route.

Changelog:

• Get fucked, lesbians! The somewhat neglected start of Keisuke's route is back in focus with refined polish. From the option choice of getting on Keisuke's route to the end of the first HCGs with him in his dorm room, the sharpness of the writing, reduced rambling verboseness (although much of what was there is still behind Awkward >= 4 with new layers of polish), facial expressions, character animations, stylistic consistency, sound effects, music looping, extra C.H.E.A.T.S. variants, and overall quality have been polished to a honed edge that in my opinion surpasses the high bar for quality, polish, and attention to detail set by the most recent Britney writing. Did I mention that it's 4.5 hours, of which nearly 3.5 hours of is brand-new writing? 4 sex scenes, too?!
• Before I get to explaining the big thing, I want to point out that part of the edits involve Zach realizing (with Control >= 4) that it's a good idea to get sunglasses for the walk to Keisuke's dorm room. It's the same scene as without them, but Zach now has sunglasses and will either wear them, or take them off them off when talking to people, either by moving them on top of his head or holding them in his hand, before ultimately just putting them in his pocket when he goes inside Keisuke's dorm building. Seriously, I love women wearing sunglasses, so this slight outfit change gives Zoey a dorky cool girl vibe that I can't get enough of.
• Anyways, that big thing is that those placeholder menu options when Keisuke walks in on Zach masturbating are now able to be picked, and they lead to 2 new alternatives to the sex scenes in Keisuke's dorm room. Fantastic new art commissioned from TiltSHIFT (and heavily edited by me for stylistic consistency with things such as the hair color, overall shading tint, breast size, belt direction, zipper, etc.) has been added to the game for these, as well as for replacing the placeholder art in the Keisuke dorm room scenes that existed previously. Purple-haired placeholder Zoey isn't quite gone from the game yet, but her time is getting very short; also, from now on, I will not be doing color variant for the CGs as these are not going to be in a final version of the game and they take up to 4 hours of time for each CG to make, and I have much more important things to do with the development of this game to move it forward rather than to the side.
• This means that there are 3 different ways Zach's relationship with Keisuke can turn more intimate based on how honest Zach is with his best friend: full honesty and an immediate confession of guilt lets Zach off the hook with a slap on the wrist and a light bit of fingering that Zach has to agree to (or begs Keisuke to get the fuck out so Zach can finish), Zach only confessing his guilt when explicitly and unambiguously questioned about what he was doing that leads to Keisuke being mad but a long personal conversation that makes Keisuke briefly forget what Zach did until Zach accidentally reminds him (and lets himself get sent into an aroused tailspin before asking Keisuke if he wants to feel his tits... you know, for science...), and a completely redone version of the harsh punishment scene that had previously been the only option.
• I make it as clear as possible with prior foreshadowing and dialogue in the moment that your choices can lead Zach into a dubcon scene, but there is now also a bad end where Zach can walk out of Keisuke's dorm and end their friendship right there (as well as his chances of ever turning back into a man). If you don't like the dubcon scene, avoid it, but it makes sense with reasons in the secret lore and Keisuke outline; also, Keisuke's tone has been made a lot clearer and is way less... dubcon-y. Don't worry, Rich is going to repurpose a lot of the tone of this writing for his sex scenes with Zach.
• There's some polish to a few of Britney's scenes, and a bit of new content for Day 3 morning with her, but Keisuke kind of took over this release.
• I changed the first lines of narration as Zach wakes up at the very start of the game to remove the "I'm Zach Taylor" part. Zach/Zoey is technically narrating the facts of the game after it has happened and it'd be weird for Zoey to describe herself like that in the past tense, and this (plus a few other slight changes) make it more clear that this story is being told in the past tense with ambiguity about whether or not the narrator is still this person. Plus, I think it's a bit smarter and less blunt.
• Zach's mom calls Zach "Zachary" (his full first name that he hates) when she gets really upset at him. Yes, she knows he hates the full name, but she use it to exert her authority as a parent.
• The World Information entry for Zach's mom, Samantha Taylor, has been greatly expanded, giving her a more sympathetic role as an antagonist in Zach's life rather than that of an uncaring villain. This isn't actually too much of a tone shift for her as she was already on that trajectory for the Keisuke route; remember, the "Keisuke" route is more like the "Zach (and Keisuke)" route as Keisuke is a more static character who takes a bit of backseat to Zach on the long arc to being Zoey. Anyways, Zach's mom is going to be a more important part of Keisuke's route than in the other routes, so it's important to get these details squared away so there's a path for a partial redemption and even healing of her relationship with her son-turned-daughter.
• "The Egg Cracker" (aka, Ai's "therapy" session) has gotten a pass of the same polish to the expressions and writing as the first major chunk of Keisuke's first day. It's still largely the exact same, but... more refined and focused. It's weird to accept that this game has a 13% chance to change the gender identity of anyone who played it, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming. If you're going to realize who you are because of a sucker punch from a pornographic visual novel, the most likely scene to make you realize that might as well be as good as it can be.
• Ai has a brief explanation about re:Dreamer's quests and game mechanics. I somehow forgot to add this earlier.
• The jump to the transformation scene now includes the menu choice for setting C.H.E.A.T.S. that was the screen right before it begins, and this jump will always be unlocked since it's the easiest way to set new C.H.E.A.T.S. for a playthrough (and the transformation sequence is so good that I can see people wanting to return to it). I need to add a full gallery at one point, but this game's LayeredImage system is pretty damned complex so I'd essentially have to make a small version of the sprite viewer for every single CG.
• There are a ton of new author's notes everywhere.
• Zach's stutters have been standardized to the first consonant sound, not just the first letter (i.e., "Wh-What" and "St-Stop" but not "W-What" or "S-Stop"), he no longer has any stutters in his thoughts, and the way he stutters (specific words, sounds, and parts of sentences) has been given more firm consistency. Also standardized is Britney's very, very uncommon stutter that shows up in a grand total of 5 times in 1500 lines of dialogue. To show how well she is doing with that, compare that number to Zach having 390 lines with stutters in them over of 4500 lines of dialogue. That's just the lines that have a stutter in them, not the number of individual stutters, but I'm not gonna get more precise metrics for each count and add in the variants of Zach's speech with unique speaker variants and the weird text substitution method I have now that would likely shoot this number up to about 10% of his total lines having at least 1 stutter.
• The World Information entry for Zach's phone has been expanded to explain how Zach's phone (and Ai) can interface with things most phones wouldn't be able to. N-No, I totally didn't get the first Twitter ad relevant to my interests in over 9 years on the site and copy the idea to fit Zach's hacker phone...
• The outline on the "No Background" version of the text box and its text are now more legible as its outline is 87.5% opaque instead of 75% opaque.
• The protagonist's name is now controlled by a variable. I'm kind of surprised I didn't do this before... No, I am not letting players change this at-will. I am maintaining a hardliner stance on this for story integrity reasons. I do some neat stuff with that this update!
• A potential bug of loading a save weirdly from the dance game and reshowing the input prompt has been fixed.
• I have actually fixed the scene with Zach kissing Britney in the changing room. I don't know how this broke on release, but I think the Ren'Py SDK functions slightly differently with call labels than compiled releases.
• A few small issues with text substitution strings have been fixed here and there.
• There's a new function that lets me change displayable (like sprites) in the middle of a text line much more easily. It's neat and lets things roll back and change without a stutter, although Ren'Py's weirdness means I can really only do it once a line because the {w} doesn't really work as intended anymore (its delay is way too long).
• The order of the menu items has been shuffled slightly to move more important things closer to the top and less important things or potentially patron-exclusive things closer to the bottom.
• For some insane reason, I made a few of the things in the game work better with self-voicing... nobody should ever press the V button on their keyboard while the Ren'Py window is active unless you want funny things to happen.
• Zoey now has her extremely complicated beach outfit in the game from Myumi. I tested it pretty thoroughly, but it has variants for being wet, various states of undress, compatibility for all the hairstyles, and the hairstyles changing depending on the hat being on or the hood being up.
• The long straight hair from the Zoey's princess theater costume outfit is in the game (but not the costume itself, as I am behind already). This is also from Myumi.
• All of Zoey's sunglasses now work properly for gloom layers.
• The hair colors and eye colors now load properly upon loading a save in pretty much any situation I can think of them mattering.
• I redid Ryouichi's sprites, largely with getting his eyes closer to Keisuke's style by making the eye socket ridges look less harsh and shaded. It's honestly a huge improvement, even if it did take too much work because his artist didn't properly separate the layers.
• Keisuke now has a few more emote layers.
• The sprite expression grabber function now works for both Keisuke and Ryouichi, the latter who now has a sprite viewer page. Remember, these are really features for me to quickly test expressions as I code, but I leave them for you all.
• I redid the file structure of the story scripts to make more sense for long-term and far-in-the-future expansion. There might be conflicting issues for itch.io users with old .rpyc files that were compiled on the user's end, so just delete those if the game has issues. This is actually the first release I am almost 100% positive is going to break most legacy saves, so everything is unlocked on the story jump menu and the version is 0.12.0 instead of the planned 0.11.1.
• The story jump menu options (after you make a selection of where you are jumping) have been cleaned up a bit to make the selections more clear.
• A lot of typo fixes here and there.
• There's now a survey about what you think about re:Dreamer in the placeholder (end of content) screen. Please fill it out if you have the time.
• Something... big, but secret. If you know, you know.

I know the flowchart has become so big that it's gotten a bit blurry on export, so the online version can be seen on Google Drive/diagrams.net.

brb gonna sleep for like a week and then do design documents for artists. The next update will be light, but it is coming out on December 2nd like it is supposed to.