vrengames

Android Public Release!

Get it here and give it a try: Lab Rats v0.7.1a-android 

Getting things set up for android turned out to be a reasonably painless process, and gave me a reason to do a few UI tweaks while I was there to improve readability across all platforms. 

Just download the files, unzip them, and move them onto your device. Use a file explorer of your choice to install the .apk. ...

What is a "tag" exactly - Plans for v0.8

I've got my tea cooling down to drinkable temperatures and getting ready to do some writing for v0.8 for tonight. Now seems like a good time to detail exactly what sort of content I'm going to be adding to the game with this update, and in future "tag" updates.

On a high level, a "tag" is a strong desire, love, or fetish that you can train a girl to have. These are stronger than the general likes and dislikes of the character (such as Stephanie liking giving head, or Alexia having a thing for ...

Public Slut Lily

With v0.7.1 successfully launched I've started work on our next update, the public slut update! That means I'm going to need a few new outfits, and I like to get those made early as inspiration for the writing and imaging I'll be doing later. Here we have Lily before she takes a little walk around the neighbourhood.

Lab Rats V0.7.1 is Live!

EDIT: Minor bug fixed version added 4/6/2017

You can download the new version here: Lab Rats v0.7.1a 

This version of the game adds four new "hub" scenes, one for Mom, Nora, Stephanie, and Alexia. These are large branching scenes that give you more control over how you interact with the girls, and that change dramatically as your influence over them increases.

The and...

Lab Rats Android Version Ready For Testing!

Lab Rats v0.7.1 is live now, and the android version is ready for testing. You can download the .apk file here: Lab Rats v0.7.1-android 

Android devices vary greatly, so any and all feedback on this version would be very helpful. Let me know if there are any display or gameplay issues on your device!

Planning for the Future

v0.7.0 is out for testing now and nothing seems to be critically broken. We should be on schedule for the public release of v0.7.1 this Thursday night! With that rolling out soon, I thought it was a good idea to take a moment and see what's next on the chopping block.

0.7.1 - The public version of v0.7, has a pile of bug fixes and a few UI changes to improve readability and gameplay experience.

0.7.2 - The new x.x.2 designation will be for the android version of Lab Rats, which I'm worki...

v0.7.0 is live! Get it here!

v0.7.0 is finished and ready for testing! Download it here: Lab Rats v0.7.0 

This turned out to be a larger update than I thought it was going to be when I started it, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. There are 35 000 new words and 200 new images, which is the biggest addition of content the game has seen so far! Enjoy!

Oh, and of course a changelog:

- Added...

v0.7.0 Release Date

There are just a few things left to do before Lab Rats v0.7.0 is ready to go, and if all goes well I should have most of that done tonight. So, I'm happy to announce that v0.7.0 will be released to $5 patrons this Thursday night! There will be a week for play testing and bug fixing, and then the public version will be released for everyone to play and enjoy!

This has turned out to be a pretty huge update, adding 35 000 words of dialogue to the game plus something like 200 new images used throu...

More v0.7 Progress

I've finished up writing and imaging Mom, Nora, and Stephanie's major scenes now, which just leaves me with Alexia's to finish up. My schedule for the next few days is clear, which should let me get it done soon. If everything goes to plan, the patron version will be out by the end of this week!

That's all for now, I'll put out a firm release date as soon as I'm confident enough in a particular day.

The Secrets of Versioning

I'm sure you've seen version numbers come up a lot. Lab Rats is currently on v0.6.1, working on v0.7, another game might be on v1.2.2a, or v2e.2. So what does this arcane code of numbers and digits mean? How do developers assemble it?

The answer: We make it up, and it doesn't really mean anything at all. The Wikipedia page on software versioning is a fun read , but it boils down to setting some sort of ar...

Mom and Nora's Hub Scenes

I've finished Mom and Nora's hub scenes completely now. Stephanie's is completely written and imaging has started for it, and writing has started on Alexia's hub. Here are a few shots from Mom and Nora's set, hope you like them!

New Patron Reward: The Lab Rats Art Book

Since the beginning of development for Lab Rats I have had a Donator tier for patrons. The Donator tier didn't include anything extra, beyond my heartfelt thank you and a promise to do the best work that I could. A few amazing people felt confident enough in this project to fund Lab Rats at that level, and I've been looking for a way to reward them for that trust. 

Today, I'm finally able to reveal that reward! Over the last few weeks I have contacted a few artists and commissioned a coll...

Alexia's Exhibition Outfit

There was a suggestion on a post a few days ago about adding some public nudity stuff to the hub scenes. The idea fit Alexia so well that I had to put together an  outfit for it and fit it in somehow. I've still got to write the scene, but would center around the idea of Alexia wearing this and going around campus for a while, buying food or getting a book from the library.

There are so many possible spin off scenes from this too, I think I'll be revisiting this idea in the near future fo...

Move v0.7 Progress

I've started in on the imaging work for v0.7 to take a break from the writing and made solid headway today and yesterday. Mom's hub scene is the first one I'm working on; it's now 80% imaged with 36 new images added to the game so far.  On the writing side of things Mom and Nora's hub scenes are written now, with Stephanie's scene about 70% finished. 

I've been having plenty of fun writing in some more forceful direct options that become available at higher influence levels. They sho...

Game Design: The Purpose of Difficulty

Since the very first version of Lab Rats there's been talk about it's difficulty. I'll admit, v0.1 was a touch hard, since there was literally no way to build up a high enough influence score to reach the highest serum levels (v0.1 had something like 2 or 3 major scenes for each girl, and each major scene could only be done once!). Now that the game is in a decently well developed state it's about time we take a look at the difficulty of the game and figure out what needs to be done. Before we c...

More Swimsuits!

There was a good idea put up as a comment to one of my posts, suggesting that the swimsuits I've shown off before be added as one of the outfits the girls can show off to you in their hub scene. It's such a good idea that I wanted to make sure all the girls had a pair of swimsuits to model, which meant finishing up the outfits for Nora and Stephanie.

Have I mentioned I'm excited for the next few updates where I'll be able to use these outfits in some proper scenes? Because I'm very excited to ...

Mom's New Lingerie

When I was writing the harem ending for v0.6 I needed an appropriately sexy outfit for your mom to wear, since her and Nora ended up in lingerie for that ending. This is the outfit she wore for that, but I feel like there's some lost potential with it only being seen once and never used again. 

I'm going to fix that with her new hub scene, where this will be one of the outfits you can ask for her to model for you with a high enough influence score. The other girls will be getting a simila...

More Writing Progress

I've finished writing Mom's hub scene tonight, which adds about 700 lines of dialog to the game across all the various branches. That leaves Alexia, Nora, and Stephanie to go before I can move on to creating image sets and doing some testing so I can push the new content out to everyone. As I'm going through these hub scenes I'm making sure to keep the two key things in mind:

1) The player is in control during these scenes. Unlike minor scenes, which are usually triggered by the girls at rando...

v0.7 Progress Report

Work on v0.7 is underway, and I thought I'd give a quick rundown of how it's looking so far. v0.7 will be adding hub scenes for all of the girls (except for Lily, who already has one in place). These hub scenes are player triggered scenes (vs. the mostly random minor scenes currently in the game) that can be used to lower the Resistance of a girl. These hub scenes will also be used in a few different ways for the next few updates.

I have all of the hub scenes for the different girls blocked ou...

Android Port Report

I've taken a few days to look at Ren'py's support for android devices and discovered a few things:

1) Ren'py supports it out of the box with basically no back end work for me to do. It even lets me run emulators for different styles of devices for testing.

2) Ren'py's android version use a different UI layout (because of limited screen size) and would lack features like hiding the HUD and rollback.

3) The entire codebase for Lab Rats can be shared between the android version and th...

Time for some R&D: Developing an Android Version

v0.6.1 is out in the wild and doing well, with a few minor bugs reported and fixed up for the next release already. Next up is v0.7, which will add hub scenes for all the characters (currently only Lily has one, as a proof of concept added a few updates ago).

Before I get started on that though, I'm going to spend a few days doing some pure research and development. In particular I'm going to be looking at what's involved in creating and maintaining an android version of Lab Rats. If that...

v0.6.1 Release

It's time for the public release of v0.6.1!

Get it here: Lab Rats v0.6.1 

If you are a patron and have played v0.6.0, this update adds two new major scenes, one for Lily and one for Mom. If the last version you played is v0.5.1, this update adds 7 special endings that require a score over 100 with two or more girls, 2 new major scenes, and a bunch of UI and quality of life ...

Shower Scenes with Mom and Lily

I'm working on a pair of new major scenes, one for Mom and one for Lily, that take place in the shower. Now that I've got the framework for the events all set up, I can see some perfect spots for a few more major and minor scenes here in the future too.

Refactoring Complete

It's that lovely time in between the patron release and the public release where I've got a little bit of time to do some housekeeping. I've got plans to write two new major scenes for v0.6.1 (One for Mom and one for Lily), but first I wanted to take a look at how the code of Lab Rats was structured and neaten it up.

Up until now the code for Lab Rats has been stored in two files. One was the "endings.rpy" file, which held all of the stuff added in v0.5 and v0.6 that had to do with the endings...

Anatomy of a Bug

v0.6.0 is out! And, of course, there's a bug in it already. I've fixed it, and a patched version will be posted in a couple of hours when it finishes uploading. A big thank you to everyone who posted bug reports, it made tracking the issue down much easier than it might otherwise have been!

Bugs are nothing new, but I thought this one was interesting enough to take some time and look at it. This bug in particular was in a new section of code that displays information about how many times a maj...

v0.6.0 Paton Release

It's two days later than I originally planned, but it's time to push v0.6.0 out the door so you folks can get your hands on it and give it a try! 

Download it here: Lab Rats v0.6.0  

And of course, a change log going from v0.5.1 to v0.6.0: 

- Added 7 new "special" endings that override the generic endings. These special endings require a score over 100 with ...

Small Delay on v0.6.0 - Now planned for April 15th

v0.6.0 is almost completely done, but some issues have cropped up last minute and delayed the last bit of work. I hate to tease you all like this, but the release is going to be bumped back two days to give me time to take care of everything and make sure it's ready for release.

Hope you can all contain your excitement for a few extra days!

The Harem Ending

Just a quick teaser for the release of v0.6.0 tomorrow. I've been working on the harem ending, which is the last one that still needs an image set. It involves all five characters in various combinations and is about twice as long as any of the previous endings. so getting everything posed properly takes some serious time and effort. When you see the finished product though,  I think you'll agree that it's worth the time!

v0.6.0 Release Date - April 13th/14th

I've got my next few days planned out now, so I can finally announce the time for the release of v0.6.0 to $5 patrons! The new version will be pushed out about this time tomorrow (late Thursday/early Friday) with the public version v0.6.1 released to everyone for free a week after. I hope everyone is as excited as I am to get this version shipped out!

Plans for v0.6.1

v0.6.0 is nearly done, there's just one (large) image set to finish up, then a few small tweaks and it'll be ready to push out. My schedule's a little scattered over the next few days, but as soon as I've got everything sorted out I'll let you know the release day!

Meanwhile, I've got my sights turned a little bit ahead on the public release that will come a week after. I've got three things I'm planning to squeeze into that release:

1) A new major scene with Lily. Right now all of ...