1.11 Week 6 report

Happy Valentine’s Day chooms! This week our lovely artist Victoria started work on the wardrobe for the next release.

Her reaction when she saw the storyboard

I was hoping to complete the entire university section by Feb 28, but Victoria gave me a reality check this week: there’s no way we’ll have the entire storyboard written, coded and illustrated in the next two weeks. There’s just too much content.

MFAGA has taught me that it’s better to reduce scope instead of push back deadlines* – so the next release will now cover part of university, not the whole experience. 

This is disappointing to me, because I just want to keep pushing ahead fast…but we can’t go faster than possible.  😔  I know that lots of you guys will be disappointed to hear that uni is being broken into two releases, so I wanted to tell you right away.

University progress
V made a great start on the artwork, which is shaping up nicely.

In terms of story, we’re introducing two new optional sexual partners for your heroine in the next release. These are different from the 1.6 partners, because you’re able to have sex with them more than once (i.e. if you keep the relationship going they’ll pop up later in your university career). The aim is to give the heroine a backstory that feels like it has some real relationships in it, not just a series of sex scenes.

Overall I’m excited with the way university is turning out. It feels like it develops naturally from the gap year, giving the heroine the chance to become more mature and independent before she begins her intelligence career.

Other progress
We’ve also been working on some other improvements:

• Now the artwork for the expressive avatar is complete, Jeff has been working on getting it into the game.

• Thanks to Mihail and Hyneman, the character sheet is now working in a test branch, and will soon be ready to add into the game! I know, I know, it’s just a character sheet. But when I’m playing Mass Effect or Fallout or any other RPG, I refer to the character sheet a lot; when you have it, you’ll wonder how you did without it!

• Brett is working on a new method of adding new hair colours and skin tones into the game.

• Something we’ve been meaning to do for months (but which was bumped up the list thanks partly to an impassioned plea from fan Etceterotica) is improve the UI around the dice rolls. Dice rolls are the game’s key mechanic, but it’s not always clear exactly what you need to roll or why; we’ve made some big improvements to the design. (This coincides with some new uses of dice rolls in the uni sex and seduction scenes, so we’re hoping to have this ready SoonTM.)

Okay, that’s all for this week! I feel like there are a lot of different things in the air at the moment, and we’ll pull them together over the next fortnight. Take care guys, see you with an update next week!

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* But we couldn’t do this in January, since it’s not possible to release only some of the facial expressions. That was an all-or-nothing kind of deal.  We'll roll them into the next release