Oh boy. Those in the Discord server probably noticed that I highly underestimated the amount of work it takes to produce these scenes. With the first one finally having made it into the game, I hope you are happy with the result. Even though it is still a work in progress, I myself am quite happy with how it turned out.
Especially with the voicing of new and non-major characters, the audio, the sound, the feel and the general character of the voice can be a hit or miss. Sometimes you get a voice that sounds too monotone or doesn't quite hit the emotional weight you were going for (like Rosette (red head)). And sometimes you get something even better. Sometimes it all hits the spot and you get just the voice you were going for (like Mirelle (blonde)). Maybe I do a BTS some time on how these voices come to be as they can change up a character quite a lot and it is sometimes a decent chunk of work if things don't go as planned (e.g. with the voice of girl 6 which took quite a while). In general if I had to summarize the wedding scene with only one word, I'd use "alive". The scene just has so much character, I really like how it turned out.
As for the intimate part that directly follows the wedding: sexual scenes like these went through quite a lot of iteration before they ended up where they are.
The initial design had you playing the rhythm segments as you engaged in sexual acts with the girl (just replace the template girl picture above with a picture from a scene). You'd then have to either fill (if you were to please the girl) or avoid filling (trying not to cum e.g. during a blowjob) a pleasure bar by hitting ever faster incoming notes.
I found this design rather flawed, even though this was the intended gameplay loop for those scenes from the beginning of the project. It would completely split your attention, pulling focus away from the visuals and into properly playing more and more difficult rhythm segments.
After a lot of testing and changing this feature around, I ended up scraping it altogether and instead opted for a more "experienced" approach, where the scene would simply play like a movie with little interaction from the player. This way also allows the characters present to add much more emotion and context to the scene. Considering the fact that Tara had only a few Chats going into this scene, with her direction not even being consolidated yet, it turned out very well and only gives a peek into what's possible later down the line with characters you know much more intimately engaging in much more than just a blowjob. I myself am very excited for those.
What's going on? Why is the scene still "under development"?
The scenes themselves are supposed to have animations played and not be stale images. Even though, as you've seen, we can achieve a lot with just those, having some movement will improve them even more. Unity, however, decided to throw a wrench into that plan, as I am currently unable to play these animations in the engine. I've created a custom coded video player too, trying to opt out of unities built in one. So far with no success. Fun fact: during the playtesting of the scene WITH the rhythm segments, it worked completely fine. I guess we'll add this to another one of the "little things like these can come up very unexpected and impact the development cycle of the game a lot" bucket.
Obviously there is also plenty of other improvements that still need adding, but the animations not playing is the main reason. Here are some fun facts about the scene:
It had me create more than 200 pictures for the visuals, around 70 of which ended up in the final product. As a comparison, I aim for 14 - 20 pictures for 6 chat scenarios in the usual updates.
Together with the preamble chat, it has ~9800 fully voiced words. Roughly 80% of the content 6 chat scenarios would have (although since there is no branching in this scene and thusly no big chunks you don't even see, it might feel more than that).
It is also very difficult to create pictures in the same location, adding quite a lot of work to what is already something I kind of dread to do again. As it stands there is no possible way I can create one of these scenes in a single 2 week development cycle, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get to the next one.
Hope this gave a good backend-view into the scene itself. And I hope you like the end result. Feedback is always welcome.