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Lab Rats 2 has made the move to being open source! If you're technically minded you can check out the public repo on gitgud.io! You can read all of the details about what being open source means and why I'm doing it for Lab Rats 2 in this post here. The tl;dr is that it will let the community at lar

There is no new version of LR2 this month, but there is a major development for you all to hear about: Lab Rats 2 is moving to an open sourced model! There are technical details at the end of this post for anyone interested in getting into development, but first let's cover what it actually means fo

Hey, I'm finally here to give you an update on what's been going on with LR2 and my work on it's Live2D update! This progress recap is a little later than I had been planning - about three weeks, actually - because I've been slamming my head against a whole bunch of development issues without making

It's been a busy few days IRL days, which has unfortunately meant less coding time than I would have liked. I was still able to get some work done and smooth out more coding issues with the upcoming Live2D display system. Most of my work went into solving a major performance issue linked to displayi

Just a quick update for today as I continue to work on the new character display code for Lab Rats 2. With the move to Ren'py 8 (and with it Python 3) complete I've gotten back to refining the code that actually displays characters throughout LR2. I've had the basics of the display system figured ou

The recent release of Ren'py 8 moved from Python 2.7 (which has been depreciated since 2020!) to Python 3. I decided it was a good idea to get this shift done sooner rather than later and have spent the last couple of days sorting out minor issues. I'm happy to say the transition has been mostly pai

First, an update on how the LR2 display work is going! After a few days of ironing out issues (and fixing bugs that were, on review, painfully obvious) I have the basic clothing and character display code working. It properly grabs character faces, hair, and clothing, and applies only those images f

I'm back from my trip! I had hoped I would have had time to check in here, but I ended up being swamped with other things to do. There's nothing to really report (I haven't been working the last week or so), but I'm feeling massively energized to get some work done now! The current goal is to hammer

It's time for another progress update! I finally have the full Live2D model for the stand_1 position with all* of the clothing items finished! Now I can start writing the final code for LR2 to load, colour, pattern, and display this model. I had planned (drink!) to put this model into a little demo

Another short update for today. Right now I'm at 103 of 121 clothing items for the "Stand_1" position added to the model. At current pace that's 2 more days of image setup, and then I can get stuck in on the Ren'py side of things. One thing I've learned while working on this is that the tedium of tr

Hey everyone, I'm here to give you another progress update to keep you up to speed! This should be a short one, as all of my work has been on one task: Live2D model construction. As of writing I have added 53 of the planned 121 clothing items to the basic stand Live2D model. I now have a good method

Work on v0.52 and the big shift over to a Live2D centered display system continues. I had hoped to have another demo to go along with this update, but progress had been slow and I figured a dev log is better than nothing! My recent work can be divided into four categories: Experimental stuff, Ren'py

About a week ago I released a demo to patrons to show off some of the progress I had been making with my Live2D work. This is that demo, now being released to the public so that everyone who is even a little bit interested in the new tech can take a look! The demo is a short walkthrough of the new t

Work continues on the Live2D version of Lab Rats 2. A few days ago I released a second short tech demo, and I had planned to have a very limited version of that same system integrated into LR2 in time for my normal release schedule. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll be able to hit that timeta

Alright, let's try this again! There were a couple scattered references that were missed in the last wave of refactoring and apparently computers don't like that. v0.50.3 fixes the date crashes, city rep interaction crashes, and miscellaneous breast-related crashes. PC: Lab Rats 2 v0.50.3-PC Mac: La

Sorry for the longer-than-ideal wait for a bugfix on v0.50.2! I wanted to make sure I squashed all of the bugs that had been reported in addition to rolling in a large patron-provided patch. You should notice the interview UI provides more information depending on the level of recruitment knowledge

First up, I've attached a new Business.rpy file that increases the amount of market reach generated by a factor of 5, which should make it much easier to keep serums profitable, especially in the early game. Drop it into game/major_game_classes/business_related and replace the similarly named file.

The focus for the v0.47 release is a rework of the way serums are priced and sold. There's nothing in the new system that adds any new porn content, so it might not be clear why it's worth the time and effort to refine compared to adding new content. I thought I'd take a few minutes and explain why

As I get v0.46 tidied up for it's public release in a couple of days I've been thinking about what part of development to focus on in v0.47. Character renders are still high on my to-do list, but I think they're going to wait for another month or two before I dive in and rework the entire system (I'

I don't have much to report with update, since all of my work has been on writing new content, but I thought I would check in either way to let you know how it's going! I've finished up the last (I think) of the writing for taboo revisit events that are being added to Lily and Jennifer this update.

I've spent the last few days tidying up some of the bugs that have turned up in v0.45.1 and it's time for me to get to work on new content. Last month I promised new storyline stuff for Lily and Jennifer (amongst others), but that was delayed due to the strip tease system taking more time than expec

Thank you to everyone who participated in the content poll for v0.44, it really helped me narrow down what bits of content people were interested in and what could wait a little longer. I've also read through all of the comments people left, they were all great feedback and have given me a lot to wo

The release of v0.43 is just a couple of days away, so I'm busy finishing up my last few tasks for the update. All of the trainable descriptions and effects have been written and all of the old events have had their sluttiness increases rescaled, which means the only major thing I have to do is rewr

It's been a slow week for Lab Rats 2 development, mostly due nerd sniping myself with Live2D experimentation (The recent Tarkov wipe hasn't been helping my productivity either). I had fooled around with Live2D before as a potential replacement for the old shader system, but I didn't really have a go

The initial release of v0.41.1 contained a bug that caused crashes during certain sections of dialogue. That bug was addressed in v0.41.2 (which you can get here), and I thought the root cause was interesting enough to talk about, and that my experiences might help some other Ren'py dev out there. I

I planned to have this update on my progress out a few days ago, but there has ended up being significantly more writing involved than I had initially anticipated. So instead of a detailed post about it you get a quick recap, then I have to get right to work doing final testing and polish for v0.41,

The results of the last poll were clear, with more content for Lily being the clear winner, with more content for Jennifer being a notable 3rd place as well. Since posting that poll (and reading all of the comments, a ton of great ideas in there that I'm keeping in mind going forward!) I've been bus

Shortly before the public release of v0.40 I spent a few days experimenting with the native shader support Ren'py 7.4 introduced. I found that native shaders ran significantly faster, and would let me cut out a huge amount of janky, bug prone code. I've spent the last week moving LR2 over to the new