General News
Somehow I hit writer's block with the monthly news... yeah, I have no idea how that happened.
So far everything has been nice, I've been collecting feedback from the demo with the main takeaway being: Yep, I can't code for my life lmao. This doesn't mean that the demo is bad or anything like that but so far the only complain I've seen is just about some technical aspects about the game. Seems like anything art-related has been really well accepted.
I want to apologize for that, I'm not a programmer and, honestly, I have no interest in it either so my code is really bad and unoptimized, I'll try to fix it but I'm most likely gonna have to ask for help.
As for what I've been doing, I'm back at doing art studies, this time not to improve my art quality but for expanding my techniques and skills.
I'll talk more about this next month since it's part of the roadmap. But I may upload one or two things that may give you a hint of what I' trying to do.
I've been also working on finishing drawings and some pending commissions that got delayed because of the demo... Also, resting a lot, it seems that finishing the demo left me exhausted so the whole month after free release I just spent it sleeping.
I'm somewhat over it already but I just like sleeping so who knows.
About the First Demo's development:
Yep, sorry for making the poll but the reason for the delay on this month's news is that I just couldn't write the roadmap without talking about this first.
This is kind of a long thing so you can skip it if you're not interested on how the demo was done.
First, the idea for a full remake started around the release of 0.07; at the time I was already remaking some code and art for the game, since I didn't like how some events looked, and seeing how limiting the old project was in a lot of regards, the idea of just remaking the whole thing from scratch was pretty sound.
Besides, it was pretty buggy too; I still remember just seeing how broken the stealth minigame was and being like "I'm so out of here".
And for those who are new, yes, the whole remaking things has been in MaM since forever; right now I think the sprites/portraits have been remade 4 or 5 times; Alice is a clear indicator of that.
(Images are from "News, August, 2022" and "News, December 2022")
So, somewhere around January 2024 I spent around 6 months learning and working on the new UI; at first it was pretty easy since RPGM MV had some easy-to-use plugins and it worked very well for my first ideas for a new UI. I kept at it while working on some other art for the regular updates that were still being released at the time and checking on my writing for the improved scritps.
6 months seems like a lot but I'll give young Axl some credit, working on both things at the same time takes a lot of effort.
Then I kept working, probably at a slower pace, until the start of 2025.
You see, around that time I met a lot of artists in this account, I also started my art studies. Thing is, my progression skyrocketed in the 6 months I dedicated to improving my skill.
Here is an example of it, by June-July 2025 I had a good bunch of art done, some for the full release that I couldn't finish on time and some for the demo that did come out. But as you can see, the quality between young Axl and current Axl is huge, so I decided to just throw away the already existing art in order to give better quality.
On that note, I also had to rewrite quite some stuff, because I decided to commit fully to the game, both in story and lewds. So the scripts that were made for a more light, less important story just didn't work anymore.
Oh, and there's one more important thing that I had to rethink.
This drawing, if you didn't know, is what started one of the biggest inclusions in the demo: The voice acting.
Originally I was going to include custom/tailor-made music for the game but one day I had this dream about seeing the MaM girls in bunnysuits where they had voices for some reason. It was so good that I decided to commit and I did a little testing to see how much I'd like it.
Turns out I loved the potential this had so I started looking for some VA's. However, little young Axl thought he could make the whole remake in one go and started working on Liz's and Bea's VA first. Two girls that appear way later into the story. Yep. That was not a good decision.
Worse even, I might have to recast Liz's VA because I need someone with a better vocal range, so don't take the link above as the final choice for her voice. I'll try to keep it similar though, I like those vibes for her.
Also another mistake that happened around the same time while I was looking for plugins to put the voice acting into the game, I got told that it was better to move to RPGM MZ, since it'd be better for compatibility and such. And so I did, and everything went well until one thing broke the entire project and I had to spend one entire month rebuilding the game just to then spend some more time changing plugins that actually work for MZ.
If you didn't know, the old project was made in RPGM MV, and older version of RPGM.
And after all of those things, there isn't much more to say. At least nothing too interesting. By mid-2025 I just started grinding like crazy, and looking back, I'm pretty sure that a good bunch of the content was made in those final 5 moths before release.
I'd say maybe even 4, because if you remember, I lost an entire month because of an ear infection... THAT WAS HELL!!!
Finally, even if now I can say that this or that worked out pretty nicely, during the making of the demo I had to put a lot of tears, blood and sweat into it. I can't stress enough how many times I just wanted to quit, but the idea of stopping made me sicker than the stress of working on the game.
I won't talk much more than that about it because I'm over it now, but I feel like it needed at least a little mention.
More importantly, it was thanks to the support I saw to the old project that I could push through; it still amazes me that the first release I did in two months in 2022 got me this far, and I can't thank enough for all the support the demo got. I don't think the way into the full release will be nowhere as tough, but knowing that everything I did, even if not perfect, ended up pretty good took a lot of pressure away.
I can't wait to show what I'm working on during the next month, I know you guys will like it. I don't think I have much more to say so thanks again, sorry for the delay on this post and keep an eye for what I'll be posting during February!