So, another month another complete lack of progress? Well, on the surface yes but in the background, no.

Where are we at now?

Last month I reported that the game was about to be released to a focused testing group. Or that I already had. I forget. Either way, that version of the game went to them and they played the fuck out of it and found around 30 bugs and gave feedback on various things. This showed some gameplay issues. The bugs themselves were pretty ok to fix other than a couple of annoying ones and it went back to testing and so on.

We're now on the 3rd testing release and the buglist is up to 138 items, though as of writing this 109 are fixed and of the remaining, only 6 are critical fixes. The rest are annoying but not gamebreaking so are ok to work on slowly over a proper release, and the hope is that we'll be doing the next (and hopefully last) test build this weekend.

So what has changed?

Lots. From minor graphical glitches to collision issues in Pineridge to a complete rewrite of the sex system to actually literally having to learn C++ and rewrite a plugin to give us a required feature. We are now down one Developer - Moonbat has had to step back due to health and time issues, while we are now plus one Animator.

New Sex System

The major problem was controlling the sex scenes in regards to terrain. By their nature, often the animations have the characters lying on the ground, which causes issues when a lot of the scenery is rolling hills. We could rotate them to match the terrain, but you'd end up with some weird gravity-defying poses, so I looked at how to handle this in a predictable way.

The solution was actually from my current playthrough of FF7 Rebirth. Sort of. The classic game, and quite a lot of RPGs have the whole ephemeral battle arena. You start combat, get an animation to transition and you're in a controlled dungeon just for that combat.

Our version is similar, but it means the arena is perfectly flat in the center where the action happens. This works by having each level modified so there is always an arena set up to use. In some it's a section of terrain outside the main map. In others, it's a flat spot inside the map. When sex is triggered, it pulls the player, the other participant, and any enemies with a sufficient Voyeur stat within a short range into the arena. At the end, everyone gets put back into the map in the same relative position as they were in the arena. Controllable.

Character Creator

Has had tweaks. There's now a camera system so when you change a specific colorslider for a bodypart, it will zoom in to that part so you can see what you're doing.

New Animator

I'm not going to say who it is until I know they are happy to be named. However, a lot of the devcycle for this current release was taken up with just animating. Having someone who is just here to animate means I can concentrate on the actual development. I'll still be doing bits here and there. Potentially movement animations and stuff like that.

Plant Traps

Have been temporarily removed. It's annoying because we have the animations for them all set up, but implementing them is being really difficult, so I'm probably going to build the blueprints for them from scratch rather than whatever is going on at the moment. The key point is that I've got so many things to finish for this release that adding in the plants again is fairly major and would benefit from a bit more work rather than rushing it for a deadline.

Whats next?

We're going to enter the next round of User Testing in the next couple of days, if we're clear of major bugs, we'll be doing the paid and supporters releases ASAP with the public free release a week or so later. I'm hoping we're getting really close.