[Rough] Our Apartment v0.8.0.e: Act 0-4 cinematics, BJ Training implemented, other news

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Hello peeps! Sorry I'm so late, the news has been wild. All kinds of stuff about payment processors and steam and losing the money from itch was a huge blow. It kind of resulted in constantly shifting plans throughout the month(s).

So, I kind of just locked in said "Okay, game needs to release on steam ASAP and I need the big task of cinematics out of the way" but also, I needed to consider the long term a little.

Maybe the steam release still takes a bit longer due to publisher needs. Maybe I need a complete game to release on steam, maybe I can't even release on steam at all... I need to make sure I have options. So, my focus was getting this build in a more releasable state. Focusing on a degree of polish, which also means some systems reworked for stability.

I'm sorry I didn't make an update post last month; I have an odd complex about making a "nothing" update. I promised a build and a build is what I wanted to deliver...

What have you been working on the last two months?

While in early August I finished "implementing" the scenes that was only the beginning of the real work. From then I had to test the game and fix a ton of problems as the game progressed.

Until now Naomi hasn't been very visible in Act 1-3, so there had to be a bunch of work to make sure outfits and other things worked. Certain scenes have certain clothing, do camera angles work, does Naomi look at the camera right. It's all slow and repetitive.

Now there's still issues but largely things look as expected besides some animation and object clipping here and there.

But getting to this point required a lot of additional coding:

The reliability of outfits loading was sketchy, sometimes Naomi came up naked, sometimes the outfit change would fail. This happened due to various repetition, sometimes accidentally in the dialogue activation, other times in the code itself. As such the dress up function was largely reworked to make the code cleaner and less likely to repeat causing failures. This has had some side effects to the dress up UI, atm clicking the same item does not remove it. Will be fixed later.

Another long-standing issue was how to handle animation loading. Until now in short, all animations were registered to the character then sort of triggered ambiguously. Now they're called specifically and have configuration files. This also allows me to potentially more easily memory manage animations. Cause atm all possible animations in the scene are loaded into memory. This becomes more a problem as the game expands. As such this new system will replace all existing animation triggers, including sex sim which would also simplify its setup.

Unfortunately, this new system caused a MASSIVE problem with the Animation Rigging package used for making Naomi look at the camera, and for things like gropes. I believe I solved the issue but it's still a major concern and may require some refactoring elsewhere. But the issue is unless managed properly, Naomi may jitter under some circumstances.

Beyond that there's a litany of functions reworked for consistency, or better cinematic function. It's quite a bit.

The testing of these functions and slowly playing through the game is what took so much time. And thankfully it paid off, once I tested the build on the discord the issues were very few! I almost wanted to call this a [Stable] release, but sex sim didn't get any love and I don't want to fix anything on it until I redo its animation triggering. Which also impacts audio and some other stuff.

What's next?

Like I said next major task is getting rid of the old animation setup for sex sim. That would actually do a lot, enhancing modularity and making future additions much easier.

Then full focus on Act 4, scenes, progression, unlocks, and moving into Act 5. Act 0-3 may not be 100% complete but it's not major work, more like it's gonna have it's own VFX, Audio, art background, and polish pass in the future. Right now focusing on Act 4 and beyond will better prepare for the release.

Speaking, the objective with getting the game to this state was publisher review and hopefully steam review. So that's also planned this month. Yes, the game was approved before but unfortunately, we have to be approved again.

The last thing moving forward, I don't want to talk about yet but I need to make moves to secure income. This relates to the Kalan and Naiara stuff I started doing but I might pivot on that a good deal. Besides that I intend to look into some other avenues to keep things going. Itch going down was a major blow, I was able to get the ability to purchase back on itch but beyond that income form there is SEVERELY down and unlikely to recover. As things are I may not be able to hire anyone for the foreseeable future.

So, I aim to resolve that with more avenues. Many have been planned for a while but I need to accelerate them.

There may also be some changes on Patreon as well and on subscribestar too.

Conclusion

That's all for now, again sorry for going quiet like that. I was so busy I was even too side tracked for Naomi's birthday 😩. Thankfully some cool peeps remembered for me. I do plan for another release next month likely with the reworked sex sim system and maybe some experimental content.

Thanks for your support and patience

~sacb0y

Downloads

Additional notes:

Noteable errors is occasional continuity issues between cinematics and dialogue, general missing FX, and incorrect lighting (largely due to time of day differences). These can be ignored for now

Errors relating Naomi sometimes not looking at the camera when she should can also be ignored, there is one noted scenario where this looking causes animation clipping.

In dress up selecting and already equiped item will not remove it

DLSS and STP are currently disabled, only TAA available for now until I can solve another issue...

IMPORTANT NOTE! There seems to be a new issue with language selection causing a soft lock, for now change the language to English and reload the game for it to work.

Language issue MIGHT be fixed now...

Okay MAAAYBE it's fixed now, sorry I can't really test this...

Windows

v0.8.0.f

DropBox

MEGA