Chapter 6.5/7: Dev Log #1 (2,750 words someone really needs to kill me)

Hi, everybody! Happy July. I hope everyone's been staying cool. I mentioned last cycle that I'm planning on restarting my Dev Log count per chapter, so we're back with #1 again as we move on from the release of Chapter 6 the other week. This post will be covering the planned mid-cycle UI update I've mentioned a few times, as well as the starts of Chapter 7.

UI Update:

Now I know this isn't particularly exciting to most of you, but I've been working really hard on a complete overhaul of the game's UI/UX over the past month or so. I'm in the process of fully recoding every single page in the game, reworking the scene replay system, redesigning all of the character biographies, and implementing a brand new photo gallery. Below, I've explained some of the different decisions and attached some gifs that show the evolution between Chapter 6 and now (keep in mind that it's still a work in progress). I'm really excited about this stuff, but there's good news and bad news lol.

Before I get into it, none of this would have been possible without the help of Moon over in the Discord server. His graphic design help/knowledge was instrumental to redesigning the look of the game. I've built on it a lot (taking the general designs he made for the character profiles/gallery and applying their philosophies to the rest of the UI), so if you notice anything that looks bad or not-uniform, you can be absolutely sure that part was me. The parts that look good are him.

Side Bar:

This first part is self-explanatory. I was really happy when I first figured out how to code the weird floating buttons, but they've always given me issues from a technical standpoint, especially on smaller hardware. I'm really happy with the menu buttons now (especially the way they slide out to reveal the little [non-final] symbols - Pickle's idea!!). I'm also so glad to finally move on from Ren'py's default settings page.

Save/Load:

Another dorky thing I'm really excited about is the game's new Save/Load page. Most Ren'py games have two separate pages for Save and Load, despite them being visually identical in every single way. This, of course, isn't really an issue, and most players spend very little time on these pages, but as a developer who constantly needs to jump around to test things, this is the most helpful thing for me lol. Long story short is the pages have been merged into a single page where you can Save/Overwrite/Load/Name/Delete all from the same spot. For those worried about the extra click this new system requires, you're still able to quickly make a new save by clicking an empty slot. In general, I think this is so much cleaner.

Character pages:

One of the more exciting changes is the completely rebuilt character biographies/gallery system. Before, you would have to scroll through an arbitrarily ordered viewport of 30+ characters to see their profile and replayable scenes. Even when you found the character you were looking for, their page was generally pretty ugly and barebones (it worked, but it left a lot to be desired).

The character profiles are now broken up into three separate groups (Students, Faculty, and Misc.) which not only makes it less unwieldy but gives me room to add pages for our male characters and other minor characters which I couldn't before. I'm still not 100% sold on the Students/Faculty designation, but I didn't want to do "Main/Side LIs" as that felt equally arbitrary, and I didn't know how to differentiate them. Out of everything I could think of, I'm most happy with this (even though most of the characters in the faculty section aren't involved with the school at all). You can kind of just think of the dividing line being age lmao. Younger love interests=Students, older LIs=Faculty. Don't think about it too hard. Anyway, I'm a lot happier with these viewports and each characters' newly designed biography page. You can still access a character's replayable scenes from these pages, as well.

Photo Gallery & Scene Replay:

While you're still able to check a character's personal page for their scenes, there is now a dedicated scene replay page where all replayable scenes will be viewable. Here, you can launch any replayable scene and filter it per character. I don't show it in the gif, but each locked thumbnail can be clicked to show a hint on how to unlock it (which really shouldn't be necessary considering how linear this game is, but it's there!). This makes it really easy to see how many new scenes were added with an update or if you've missed anything.

Connected to this, though, is the page I'm most excited about: the brand new photo gallery! Throughout the game, you'll be able to unlock special renders by either progressing through the story or discovering hidden clickables in a render (a feature soft-launched in Chapter 6 and since reworked and fully implemented). As you can see in the gif, the photo gallery has already been populated with nearly 200 images. I've retroactively gone through the game and made sure there were things to find and unlock in every chapter. This does mean you'll have to replay the game if you want to discover everything (or use the Unlock All code lol), but I think it also eases the pain of something I'll get into a little bit later xD.

Most of the renders you can unlock in the photo gallery are pulled from this Patreon page and come from all different eras of the game's development. This means a lot of the images are ones those of you who actually read these (or skim them) may have seen before, but this also solves a huge sore spot for me. Over the last few years, Pickle and I have spent countless hours working really hard on beautiful renders to share during development cycles, and they always really quickly die on Patreon/Discord and kind of never get seen again. Last Christmas, for example, Pickle and I made something like 60 renders to celebrate the holiday season, and they're genuinely some of the best stuff we've ever made, but obviously no one has seen them since Christmas haha. Now there's a scene in Chapter 6 where you can click on something and unlock and enjoy 20+ Xmas renders. It gives them a second home, and that means a lot to me.

Just like with the scene replay page, each image will have a hint on how to unlock it if you're stumped, and they can all be filtered by character. I also know that it's a lot of images, but many of them unlock in batches and a lot of them just require playing the game (finishing a chapter, for example). Because there are so many hidden renders, though, I decided it was too distracting and immersion-breaking to constantly see an icon in the top left whenever there's a hidden render somewhere in an image, so I decided to turn that off by default. In the settings, though, you'll be able to turn this cheat/helper icon on which I think is especially good for replaying the game. You're free to turn it on whenever you want, but I do think it's infinitely more fun to click on a goofy little thing in the background because you think it might unlock something and then realize you're right. It's up to you.

UI/UX Recap:

Anyway, I know that was a lot, but I'm really proud of the progress we've made on this and think it's shaping up pretty well. There are lots of things I didn't mention (updated History viewer, brand new boot-up screen, new UI sfx) and even more left to do (new dialogue box, updated quick menu, updated main menu page), but I hope you like the look of things so far. One of the coolest things is that all of this stuff will be accessible from anywhere in the game (scene replay included), so hopefully this will prevent people from needing to ask what Abby's favorite movie is when they get to Chapter 6 (it's in her character page, guys!!).

I did mention some negative aspects of this update, though, and that's that I absolutely will be breaking all of your saves, and I do mean every single one. I took this opportunity to rewrite my entire system, which meant updating all of the game's variables so they're cleaner and easier for me to track moving forward. As I've mentioned countless times, I started this project with absolutely no experience in any aspect of it, and there's nowhere that that's more obvious than in the code; calling it messy and disorganized would be generous. I thought about getting into specifics, but I think it's easier to just say that this was something I needed to do if I wanted to have any chance of properly balancing nearly 30 love interests going forward. Long story short, you will absolutely not be able to load old saves in any capacity, and the game will almost certainly crash if you do LMAO. There will be a reminder on the main menu about this so don't worry about forgetting lol.

To rectify this, I'm building a save-rebuilder system that you can turn on from the game settings. This will let you quickly and easily start a brand new harem run and jump to whatever chapter you like or re-create your unique save from scratch by carefully picking and choosing the specific characters and decisions you're interested in. I know this is frustrating, and I'm sorry, but this is the best time for me to do this. I hope the save-rebuilder and the hundreds of unlockable images eases the pain a little bit!

Anyway, that's pretty much all of the info I have as far as the UI/UX update stuff. I don't have a release date for this, but I will be releasing it as its own thing before Chapter 7 so we can iron out any bugs (and so those who'd like to replay before new content comes out are able to). It'll likely contain some updated renders/animations if I can find the time to fit them in, but it'll mainly be a QoL-focused mid-cycle update. Thanks for reading all of this (comment "pickle rocks" if you actually did)! I know it's a lot of stuff, but we (and Moon!) have been working on this on-and-off for a few months now alongside normal development of the game.

Chapter 7:

This week, for example, most of Pickle and I's focus has been on the early stages of Chapter 7. It's still too early to show anything, of course, but the update has been fully outlined which means we can now really start moving forward with the rendering/animating process. I know a lot of devs actually fully write their updates out down to the dialogue before they start work on bringing them to life, but this has never really worked for me. Too much of a scene's pacing/dialogue rests on what I ultimately have access to. For a game like this which is very, very visual and bounces between so many different maps and clothing/hair styles, etc., we like to create a super detailed outline of a scene's general concept and purpose and then prepare the scene's assets (maps, objects, character cards). Only when we know we have everything we need to begin truly rendering the scene do we get into the specific line-to-line dialogue, oftentimes writing it alongside the rendering process. A lot of the conversations in this game that I'm proudest of (Kai and Desmond talking about their kids/late wives in Chapter 4, Bodhi and Wake in the hot spring in Chapter 2) were practically improvised, written as a result of the renders rather than the other way; conversations, by their very nature, are improvised, aren't they? It's good to be prepared and know what you're talking about before starting one, though xD

Anyway, long story short: Chapter 7 is officially outlined and we're in the process of getting all of our assets together. If you've played Chapter 6, you should have a good idea of what the next few updates will look like (at least as far as which characters we'll be hanging out with, etc.). This last update was enormous—by far the biggest the game has ever had and well beyond what your average AVN update looks like—but it took forever to make; I just didn't really know where else to end it. These next few in-game days should be easier to break-up, so we're going to experiment with releasing some shorter chapters and seeing how it feels. That's really all I can say now, though. The detailed outline of the update is finished; Pickle is hard-at-work hand-crafting all of the wonderful outfits she's so good at making (as well as making lots of custom hair and clothing mods specifically for them); I'm scouring the resources we have access to to ensure we have high quality maps and assets so we can get as close to the vision we have for these upcoming scenes as possible. There's a lot to look forward to! Please be excited!

Patreon Recap:

Obviously, the main thing that happened this last month was the release of Chapter 6! I hope that everyone who has played it enjoyed it. It's never too late to share your thoughts, so please let us know in whatever way you're comfortable how you feel. Every time we release an update, I want to send a Google form or something out where I can explicitly ask people about their favorite characters, favorite scenes, etc. because I feel like the only way to get that kind of focused feedback is if I chase y'all down and wring it out of you, but I'm honestly just too lazy to put a questionnaire together LOL. Maybe next time. If you've actually read this far for some reason, maybe let me know who your favorite character is after the recent update! It's always really fun for me to see how the answers to that question change over time. Anyway, here's a small recap of some of the stuff we've posted this month! It's all free, as always.

• Chapter 6 is public and free to play!

• Happy Father's Day!

• Celebrating 1,000 followers on Patreon!

• Celebrating 1,000 members on Discord!

• Frankie trying on a new bra (community commission)!

• Landa in a revealing nightgown (community commission)!

• Bishop family abs workout (community commission)!

• Baseball Kana!

• ...and more!

If you have any fun ideas you'd like to see brought to life, make sure to join the Great Olds Ones tier and submit as many commission requests as you'd like!

Community update:

It's crazy to think that, after 3 years, we hit 1,000 members in the Discord server just last month and now we're already approaching 1,250. The game's really growing, guys! Two days ago, we finally hit 300 ratings on Itch.io (even if it was a flurry of 1-star reviews that put us over the edge LOL), and just yesterday we hit the 150k downloads milestone there, too! To everyone who downloads the game from the official site and goes out of their way to leave ratings and kind comments, it's hard to put into words how much it helps us get discovered by new players, so thank you all so much. I'd also like to quickly thank Zach over in the Discord server who organized some server events last month. We had a movie night and a drawalong event where folks watched Rush Hour 1/2 and drew some fun pictures of Emma and Sasha (you can see some of them here).

I don't think there's anything particularly of note coming up in the server, but I am thinking about reworking the current character roles system to force you to pick a specific favorite character (evil, I know). Right now, you can head into the roles channel and select the role for every single character you like; they don't do anything but sit on your profile as a badge of sorts (Ken Kibitzers, I see you). I was thinking it could be fun to be able to only choose one character at time, but that role will give you a specific name color and little icon next to your name. Thoughts?

Personal life update:

As always, I spend every free moment of my life on this game, and I have nothing to report. I watched Jeopardy the other day. One day, I might play a video game if they're ever affordable again.

Thanks for reading, everyone! Even though I really don't believe it!

~cure