Progress Report #91 - Almost there!

Hey lads!

First of all, sorry about the lack of news for over a month. Really, a lot of happened in my life. While posting the same thing "I'm still trying" over and over seemed pretty pointless to me, so I waited until I had some worthy info, but I hoped for something like "Bam! I've finished!". Well, didn't work out... Also I'm much more active on my Discord.

Since I'm getting a lot of messages lately, if anyone of you feel scammed, cheated or whatever, and wants the refund, just let me know. I wanna stay fair (despite needing money more than ever), since I couldn't deliver promised updates on time. Thanks a lot for understanding and even greater thanks to anyone who stayed.

In short, my life was a real hell in the last few weeks, but after 3 months hospital finally decided to perform the surgery on my daughter and so far everything seems fine and she's stable. I'm exhausted physically and mentally, I lost weight, my health problems worsened, my productivity was shit, and I tried writing long progress reports twice, but in the end I deleted them both, because they felt more like a little's bitch whining. Basically, broken game, my kid's situation and some recent real life events were all killing me (not to mention angry patrons cancelling their pledges and some people insulting me, but I don't really blame them). Tried taking some time off from the project, playing games, going for a walk and doing other stuff, but nothing really helped, as it was only a temporary relief (just like alcohol works), but what I needed was to fix my shitty situation. After getting my kid into the hospital and operated, I feel so much better, so I'm already trying to fix the game again. If you ask me how close I am to fixing the game, I would say that closer than further, but since so many things are connected and code is such a mess, changing one thing breaks another and I had to do some changes blindly. I know that it might look like an abandoned project or game dev burning out, but I didn't invest so much money and time into the art update just to drop it like that (and my family would starve), while I agree that I was getting pretty burnt out by trying to fix the game's memory consumption, but I also didn't spent so much time on trying to make it work to give up now. All I can say is that you need to wait and I can't promise anything. If I fix it, I'll make sure to let you all know via all my social media.

Main logic for loading art is done (art is loaded after a very short delay now, as you can see textures loading in the Unreal Engine games), and right now I'm in the middle of fixing whole project, since I basically moved from loading all art into the memory together with the game start, to loading only filepaths, IDs, text etc. only when they are used and needed, and everything on 5 years old project with really messy code, where everything is connected to art. I have to rework how it's all connected, fix character creation, buying clothes and so on. So yeah, it's "a bit" of work, but should work so much better once I'm done, and there's not much left to do. At least I can finally see the progress as I fix things instead of going blindly, so it's also motivating.

Also, it's finally sunny and warm most of the day (aside from random blizzards and hail storms occasionally), so it helps a lot with my well-being. I recently came back from Warsaw and I'm already working normally on the project, so rest assured. Progress reports right now are late, dull and boring, but once I move onto adding new content (and trust me, I can't wait), you will see progress reports and sneakpeaks more often.

On the sneakpeaks above you can see Jane's Kitchen's Balcony (want to use it for some NTR & exposure events and it will be a part of the NTR update in v31/32). Then there's Hospital - Entrance, Gynecologist, Maternity Room (Gynecologist will be used for multiple events, also as a part of pregnancy, while maternity will be used mostly for late pregnancy stuff) and Science Street (coming together with Hospital, but University won't appear this year, it's a really distance future). I have my hands full with the broken game, but my artists are already working on the future content, so it's ready beforehand, we don't waste time and don't have delays because of the unfinished art.

And last, but not least important, the Poll Results. The top 3 winners are Cheap Brothel, Night Club and Beach, and I'm gonna add them in this order.

Cheap Brothel (Slums East) - Jane can work here. Cheap & shitty version of Kinky Nymph brothel. Basically the lowest & dirtiest scum come here. With it I'll have to rework a bit both Kinky Nymph (making it more luxurious and harder to get into) and street whoring, so they all feel different. One of its features will be something like a breeding pen, so one girl and multiple men taking turns.

Night Club (RLD West) - Drinking, dancing and having fun with complete strangers, what to say more? Will have to add drunkenness state, but I'm still not sure how I'll limit it throughout the game (getting everywhere & talking with everyone while being drunk would be problematic). Also, I'm not really fond of making dance animations, but I guess I'll have no choice :P

Beach - New location in the north-west part of The City. Sunbathing, swimming, flirting or sex, whether it's in the water, hidden somewhere or exposed. Beach will consist of a few smaller locations, like changing room or cave. A lot of potential for events in the future, but a also huge amount of work.

Roadmap currently is something like this - NTR (v31/32), pregnancy (v33/34), lesbians (v35/36). These 3 are our main priority, and depending on how smoothly it will all go, I will try to add stuff from the poll results somewhere between these updates, or after them. We will also update some of the UI icons either still in v30 or v31. Obviously, there will be new faces, clothes, events and other content among these updates, too.

I most likely forgot about some stuff I wanted to mention, but it's 2 am already and I need some sleep.

Cheers!

EDIT: Forgot to mention, there's a monthly giveaway of the newest game updates on my Discord. All you have to do is to post game related meme, but this time 2 winners of the April's Meme Contest will get to name the Hospital & University.