Hello, folks!

This is it, the last Friday of 2023, and I'm back with another Progress Update.

We meet again.

So what's new since last week?

Well, I thought I'd talk a little about corruption and romance. But first, let's get the actual progress report out of the way. Last week I was at 200 renders done and ... 5? animations. I said I had script written for about 150 more renders. This week was productive due to some days off RL work what with the holidays.

Now I'm almost at 350 renders and 8 animations done. And I'm almost out of script. That means this weekend, I'm going to have to get back to writing for the last scenes of the coming update. I'm counting 5 small scenes and 1 large.

So how long is that going to take?

Not too long according to me. Too long, according to some! A release in January is all I'm going to promise right now.

Okay, so what was that about romance and all that about?

Yeah, so paths. A visual novel as we know it is basically a long story illustrated by images, with some choices. If it has no choices, we call it a kinetic novel instead. And if it has elements of free roaming, it's a sandbox.

The "problem" with visual novels is the combination of development time combined with the outcome of choices. If you chose A, you expect an outcome, but if you chose B, another outcome. These are paths. If a sex scene takes 3 days to do, having an option between two sex scenes, takes 6 days instead.

Basically, the more branching you have, the shorter each branch will be in a play-through (or take double, triple, and so on development time).

You're building up to something. Out with it!

No, no, not really. I'm just talking. This is the reason why, for example, if you skip a scene with a girl, you don't get another scene instead. I often make sex scenes skippable because some people are a bit, erm, rabid about certain girls and I don't want to force anyone to eat anyone's ass ;). But to develop whole scenes just for people who skip other scenes - That'd take too much time. If you skip, you'll have less content. Simple as that.

This is also the reason you almost never see pregnant girls in these types of games, until quite late in the game. Unless it's a game aimed at pregnancy "fetish". Imagine if I'm doing a sex scene with Hannah. It has a romantic and a submissive variation. So it's basically two scenes. Now let's say she might be visibly pregnant, if you took that option. Now you need to render four scenes. Of which players will see one. The workload gets crazy, the length of updates plummets.

Anyway, romance (affection) and submissiveness. No, no, I'm not dropping either. I'm just making an observation. When I see people comment on specific scenes in a positive way, or liking this and that piece of writing, it's almost always the submissive route. The corruption. It makes me wonder if it's because it's better done, or if it's just more popular overall. There's also the possibility that the few people who do speak up, don't represent the majority view. I know some people have more than one playthrough, more power to you!

I think I'll have to do something like a public poll on that.

Okay. Are we done? My eyes are starting to ache.

Well, I wanted to touch on one more thing. Variations in scenes that are not announced by a choice.

Sweet Jesus, just make it short?

Okay, so ... Someone asked why Hannah didn't give Beth a kiss in his playthrough. It happens after Hannah's spanking. It's just three renders.

It happens after the spanking if you've raised Hannah's bi-curious stat. There are little things like this all over the place. Mostly quite small. From just a small tweak in the dialogue to some renders. These things are also consequences of choices, but not immediately and not really noticeable unless you do multiple playthrough's and you may not notice most of them even then. Anyway, that's why that happened, or didn't happen.

Okay, that's it from me today. Sorry if it got wordy.

zZz zZz

See you guys next year, and thanks for your support! HAPPY NEW YEARS!