Update 15 Progress Report

Hey everybody!

First of all - New Trailer! Take a look and I hope you enjoy it!

Now, aside from that, let me tell you what I've been working on this week. 

I am mostly finished with my testing of new content. Everything seems to be playing good and I'm happy with it. Will be sending over to my alpha testers soon so that they can find all the stuff that I missed. 

RJ Talks About Menus for a Looooooooong Time

Currently, I'm reworking some of the menus and I want to show you what that's going to look like. 

This is the first big change, and it's going to be a little controversial I know, but I removed the percentages from the main menu screen. 

While I still like the idea of them, there's a few reasons why I did this. 

Firstly, is that it causes a lot of bugs. The percentages rely on a lot of little bits of code in every scene that counts that scene as completed. If I happen to forget a piece of code or something, then the scene will not count as completed. This wouldn't usually be a big deal, as I could just add the little bit of code back in and we're all good, but since I'm releasing the game in updates like this and not all at once, there have been many times that there's an issue several updates back that wasn't caught, and is causing a bug that I now can't fix without modifying your save file. It's a pretty big hassle. 

Secondly, I've been getting a lot of comments like, "I don't want to have a threesome with Bai, but if I don't, Tammy will be incomplete." 

Part of me is like, well if you don't want to do 100% of the content, it's not going to show you have completed 100% of the content. You don't have to. But another part of me understands wanting to see that 100% on everything. I feel like the percentages push people to play the game in a way that I'm not intending. The whole point of this game is to play what you want and ignore the rest. Play the bits that excite you and skip the ones you're not interested in. So, to that end, I think it would be better if the percentages are not there. 

It's possible I add them back in at some point when the game is finished or mostly finished. But for now, we're going to try this. 

Okay, next part of the menus that I changed: 

When you go into a character's profile, it's going to look like this now. Not a huge difference, but there's a few significant changes. 

First of all, previously in the code, these profiles were just one image with different places on the image that you could click and text overlaying certain areas. Now, there are different images and each is their own element. This makes it much easier on my end to change things in the future. It also lets me do things like have the character's portrait change at different times of the game. So, when you start the game, Suzy's portrait might look like this, but later it could change to different outfits, or naked, or something. Also, I could give the player the ability to choose which portrait displays here. I haven't implemented any of these things yet, but am planning in the future to do that. 

The second big difference is that there's no longer a Dates or a Sex section here. I've removed those, because I think they confused people and to me, they feel unnecessary. There were plenty of times that I had people wanting to see a specific sex scene (such as the scene where you stay at the hotel with Lisa), but when they click the Sex area of the menu, that scene is not there. So they were like "What the heck RJ? Why can't I replay that scene?" The sex area of the menu was just for the repeatable sex scenes though, not the story scenes that happened to have sex in it. The thing is, those scenes, along with the dates, can be repeated at any time that you'd like, so what's the point in me having them in a replay gallery? Just go on another date. Have sex again. It's easy. The gallery seems unnecessary, to me. That said, it's possible I add them back in later, after I finish setting up these menus properly. It would be a lot of extra work to do it now though, so for now, I'm going to skip them and see how we like it. 

This is what you'll see if you click into the Scenes section of a character's menu now. Instead of just the text buttons, I've added little image buttons. 

You'll notice that if you have completed the scene, the image in the Polaroid is filled out and clicking it will let you replay the scene. 

If you have not completed the scene, the image is blacked out. And if there is another character required to complete the scene, it will show their thumbnail image on the blacked out Polaroid. 

I'm pretty happy with the way this looks overall (though I'll likely change the black background image at some point). Looking forward to hearing about how you all feel about it. 

The conversation menu is still pretty much the same. I want to redo it at some point to make it look nicer and allow me to fit more conversations on the screen, as they're kinda spilling over for a few characters. But I don't think I'm going to have time to do that this update. 

One difference is that I've decided to go ahead and show the conversations that you haven't had yet, instead of just having them display as ??????? 

This is mostly because when people were missing a conversation, they had no idea which conversation they were missing, which made it tough to troubleshoot and just kind of annoying overall. For instance, Ms. Welch has a conversation where she asks about the MC's relationship with Adrian. If a player is missing that conversation now, hopefully they'll be able to tell that it's because they don't have a relationship with Adrian. 

Okay, last little bit. I've gone through and changed up the options menu like this, where it will now show if there is new content in a choice. This should help make things more clear when there are options like taking a character on a date, or when you're choosing sex options, which ones you haven't done yet. 

Eventually, I want to replace many of these menus with image menus, but I'm not going to have time for that this update. 

Final Thoughts

Okay, I think that's pretty much it! I'm not quite even halfway done with doing all the menu work, so that's what I'm working on for the next few days, before sending the update over to Alpha testers. Also going to try to replace some older images (mostly old low-quality sprites) that don't look good. Trying to squeeze as much as I can into this update before I release. 

Oh, it's my birthday today lol. I kinda forgot about that. I'm not really doing much for my birthday, because I wanted to work on the game and continue unpacking and setting up the new house. But we're going out to lunch with my Mom and Sister. And in a few weeks, after the Update is released, we might take a little mini-vacation somewhere. 

Hope y'all have an amazing weekend! Love ya and thanks so much for all your support.