This week, I have mostly playtested and polished the episode. I played plenty of runs from a variety of different branches. As always, there's a lot of canon content flavored by choices in the episode, and there are plenty of branched scenes and unique branch content, too.
It took me roughly 6-6.5 hours to play through the episode once without mini-games, while reading everything, not rushing but also not pausing for longer than needed. The duration would have been slightly longer if I had played with mini-games enabled, and in subsequent runs, it depends on how much content you read again or skip through. I also know every bit of how the free roam events work, which should shave off some play time too - you know, in case you get lost trying to find something *wink wink*.
As a whole, it's an episode worthy of a season finale in many different ways. I can't wait to read the discussions and your reactions.
Main menu changes
I did some work on the main menu and decided to make the platform versions more similar. I added a changelog button to the main menu. Click it, and a dialogue pops up with the log of version changes. The version number has moved into this changelog as well, and in its place on the main menu, you'll find a Quit button, much like the Steam/GOG versions.
Animation queue
All PCs are rendering animations, and the speed has sadly slowed down a bit. But it's not by much; we're talking a 5-10% general decrease.
The decrease comes from the kind of lewd scenes the PCs are rendering. I've had one lewd scene that rendered faster than the rest, and that lewd scene only has one more animation left to render. Of the remaining 4 types of lewd scenes in the queue, they seem to be similar in render times.
31 animations remain in the render queue, and the estimated remaining render time is 15-16 days - still on track for the end of the second week of July.
Polishing
After playing, I realized I needed a few more renders in one area of the episode. I will pose and render those next week when I work through my to-do list of polishing activities.
That to-do list is smaller than usual. It only has 21 to-dos after this week's runs, and I haven't stopped to fix anything yet; I've just been playing and making notes on what to fix. Usually, this to-do list has 70-100 things to fix during the polishing phase.
I think the low count is a testament to the focused work I did for every branch during this development cycle. Hopefully, I didn't let much slip.
New feature - Sex sounds
I've playtested the feature I've been working on for a few weeks, and based on what I've seen, there's no reason not to include it in v0.12.0.
Today, I can reveal what it is. I've added sound effects to lewd animations. We're talking sex sounds here. It's a new feature that you can enable/disable that comes with a separate volume slider, like this:
So if you don't like what you hear and want to keep the game the way it used to be, you can mute it.
To clarify what it is and what it isn't, I've worked on making the sounds effective without letting them steal too much attention.
As there are no voice actresses for the girls, we're not talking about moans and sexy talk; we're talking about different kinds of body sounds. Kisses and blowjobs are not included, as I felt those would need voice acting to have a good effect. And I've been very careful when adding the sound effects, as I wouldn't want anything to come off as off-putting.
The labor-intensive part was the synchronization, as I had to go through 1400+ animations to do this. But I did that in a few days of efficient work.
I manually synchronized the sound with each animation, then wrote a script to automate the audio muxing. Running the script and merging animations with audio takes less than 5 minutes with that script - I love scripts, they make development tasks so much easier.
I'm pleased with the way it turned out. I think the sounds elevate the lewd scenes, but I'll leave the final verdict to you.
This feature does, however, come with a bit of a problem - Episode 12 patching. The majority of the video files have been updated to include sound, so to get this feature with patching, you'd need to download a huge patch, which would almost make patching redundant. You would have to re-download all the animation RPA files for each episode of the season.
So, I have decided to exclude the updated movie RPA files from the episode 12 patch and make them available as a separate download if you want to add the sex sound while patching.
To avoid confusion, this is what it will mean for this release:
Basically, if you intend to patch your game and want the updated animations with the sound effects, you'll need to download some extra optional files. And if you intend to download the full version of the game, you don't have to worry about it - it's included by default.
If you're not comfortable patching your game, I strongly recommend downloading the full version.
Have a nice weekend
Dr PinkCake