Dev Update! 1/27/26

Hey, folks! Hope your week’s off to a good start! My little corner of the USA got around a foot of snow over the last week which, when you’re not prepared for it, turns out to be kind of a lot! Hope you’re all staying safe and warm out there!

Yesterday I finished placing all the images I needed to, for the next build of Season 2, Chapter 14. In the course of placing said images, I realized I had another 20ish I still needed to render – but I knocked those out pretty quickly.

I still need to:

• Create the scene-specific images for characters’ speaking portraits. These can be a little annoying due to the sheer volume of characters and costumes I like to use per update, buuut I don’t think they’ll take too long. Also I figured out the coding function to switch characters’ portraits, instead of doing it in the donkey-brained way I had been doing it. It’s so much easier that I’ve been kicking myself for not investigating it sooner. Stupid, stupid Neon.

• Finish the coding for a couple of weird functions. There’s one bit of the script where you get to choose if Mason wears a wig or not, and I wanted little visual buttons of a mannequin wearing the wigs, to show the player what each option would look like. There’s also some scrolling menus, etc. I’ve already written and tested these in a little file I use for that purpose, but now I just need to move them over into the game.

• Set some variables. Certain characters got a little unwieldy with their various statuses, etc. So, before the new season gets going, I’m using the big ‘recap montage’ that sums up where all the characters are, their feelings toward you, etc. to streamline some of their variables, and make sure everything’s a little easier to maintain. I also just need to do my usual thing of proceeding through each menu option and tagging anything important with a variable, just in case I need to call back to it later.

• Finish Gabby’s outro scenes, which follow her ero scenes.

My plan is to get a new build out tomorrow, which has all the endings except Gabby’s. I’ll probably label this a test build, since I don’t really consider it an alpha unless all the planned content is there, and Gabby’s won’t be until those outro scenes are finished. If I can get the new build out tomorrow, I’m cautiously optimistic about wrapping up Gabby’s content, and having the alpha out this weekend. But my cautious optimism tends to frequently collide with the hard wall of reality and time constraints, so I can't promise anything right now.

As always, thanks for your patience and support while I polish things up. Take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you here next time!