Devblog #105

Hey Wizards!
Shady Character One here!

There are things I don’t like about game development and there are things I love about it. One of the things I like is the constant discovery of new facets and milestones. Of course, most of these are only really applicable when you are developing your first game, but nonetheless, last week we turned another major corner for our game. Last week we participated in our first Steam festival. A relatively minor one, even though the organizers did an amazing job if you ask me. Still, it was really nice to participate in a real event and get a couple thousand new wishlist additions as a prize. All in all, I felt really uplifted by the experience. I don’t know whether not having a playable demo on Steam affected our performance or not, but there’s really no use lingering on these ifs and maybes. We’ll just have to have one ready for the next one.

It always is a bit scary to show your work to other people, and even though we are truly blessed by a great community of players, every time we post something there’s this gremlin sitting at the back of your mind whispering “what is it this time you’ll do something very wrong?” He’s always there. Like a splinter in your brain. But ignoring him and continuing to make things, and seeing how people like it (well, not all of them - I don’t believe there will ever be a time when our new update gets uploaded to F95zone and we will not get several angry replies and low ratings) is always an experience worth working for.

Speaking of working. Last week I finally managed to get Bassant’s first event done. I am still not sure I am quite satisfied with it though. On the one hand, it has most of what I want it to be. On the other hand, I feel like it is missing something. It seems a bit too short. But on the other hand, it is about a thousand words long, which makes it one of the longest girl-events, and definitely the longest first event. Maybe it will feel better when I test it in the game with sprites, backgrounds, music and maybe even an artwork. Or maybe I will clearly see what I am missing. For now, it has a tentative “pass”.

Another interesting development of the last week is that Shady Two and I started actually mapping out the upcoming sex scenes with our heroines. It is a process very new for us and we are still looking for the best ways to tackle them. But since several of the girls’ storylines are extremely close to their culminations, this is something that we cannot really delay. What came out of these discussions is a bunch of sketches that we used to try and find the right mood for the characters and to experiment with the poses and general composition of the shots. It is pretty difficult to properly fill a 16:9 artwork - kudos to the artists who do it well on a regular basis. Some of these sketches we even shared with our patrons, so you can see them too if you want to.

With that, I'll leave you until next week,

Shady Character One, out!