Hey everyone! It's been a bit, so here's a long overdue status report for the next game update.
Today's cover boy is Jordi from a scene toward the end of the upcoming dev build that I first mentioned in Status Report #89. In it, an exhibitionist Connor can start encouraging other guys to wear less clothes everywhere in the dorm instead of just in the showers. Of course, Jordi takes no convincing at all.
There's a more explicit alternate version of this CG, but I'll let you find it when you play...
This status report is gonna be relatively brief. Essentially, I've been dealing with some health issues off and on that have led to trying to work through a lot of exhaustion. But I've been making do, and I can now say that the first dev build for the next update will be done within the next few weeks.
I can't give a specific day yet, but the moment it's done, I'll make a post on here.
A lot of the leftover work is programming-related, making sure everything links together correctly and scouring for bugs. There's also been some additional writing to smooth over transitions between scenes, plus address choices I didn't consider initially.
This is the last part of the game that'll really be dealing with a couple dozen different plotlines at the exact same time, so it'll be nice to finally move on to the next stretch of the final release, which is a more linear section involving Evan.
Speaking of him, I've been setting up some stuff for when I get to completing all his new scenes. One thing I do before making a ton of new art for someone is give their model a once over to fix any issues I've identified over the years. Evan has already gone through a bunch of tweaks since I first made him, so he didn't really need much at all.
But I did adjust his sprite pose a little, and with the new version of his expressions all created, it was a simple enough task to finally refresh his earliest sprites, for consistency's sake. There's one in particular I liked, a sprite you can see at the party where Evan turns around and shows off his ass. Here's the old version next to the new:
(Apparently, a common trait of shorter, thicker guys in this game is booty pride!)
I'm not doing much more with him yet, but there will soon be a lot more Evan discussion when he becomes the focus of the next stretch of story I'll be making.
As for more relevant art—what'll be unlocked in the first dev build—it's all wrapped up. I did one final look at the 100+ CGs in this portion of the game to see if I wanted to revise anything to account for continuity or other details I missed originally. The majority of the images got the sign off, but I did adjust a couple.
One was a Matt selfie I shared back in Sneak Peek #38. I always thought there was something off about it, like it looked "warped" due to the camera focal length and Matt's pose. It was mainly a victim of "good enough" so I could move on.
With some distance from it, I could better see where I went wrong, so I whipped up a new version I think is a little more flattering. Here they are side by side:
Anyway, not much else to talk about right now except that I've got my head down and am getting all the final aspects of the first dev build locked down. Look for news on it soon!