Hey, guys, sorry for the delay on the news, I've been busy with a lot of pending stuff I had piled up, still have some but I got enough time to record in game footage for today, so it's fine!
Patreon won't let me upload the files, so check them HERE before reading the news.
ABOUT THIS MONTH
This month, I've been getting into the flow of things again, I've gotten some stuff done as shown with the sketches earlier this month, and I've been also working on art and such for MaM.
I may have agreed to working on a lot of stuff, so I have to get that done (which is a bit of a bother); I am intentionally not mentioning some of those are projects, since some are still not publicly announced. Some others are close to being done and they'll be published soon, those I'm pretty sure I've talked about or posted about here already.
I still need to figure out budgeting for hiring VA's and other people that from time to time work in the game but it shouldn't be THAT much of a problem. There has been some issues with VA's casting but I think it's better to talk about that next month.
ABOUT THE UI/GAMEPLAY
As you could see in the first clip, I'm adding a "sub-menu" to the map interactions with the girls. Functionally it's almost the same, it just allows me to have more control.
This is an idea I had in mind for stuff like the gadgets, but adding it for normal trance looks nice; I only hope this doesn't make navigating the menu too much slower.
I think it's pretty clear, but current UI is just a placeholder for the real ones, I'd like to make something stylish for each type of trance but it depends on what ideas come to me.
Making this a different menu rather than a part of the interaction also allows for more creativity on what you can do to the girls; currently in the placeholder it's only just the 4 buttons you already had in the first demo but I'd like to add exclusive actions and more dialogue options when you interact with a girl from here.
ABOUT THE ANIMATION(S)
Assuming you've already checked the drive, you can see where most of my efforts have been going.
Initially I thought it would be way easier to produce this kind of animations since sketching it was actually really simple. But cleaning, inking and shading have proven to be a pain (and it still needs the clothes/expression variants!), I may have gotten a little overconfident so I'll keep future animations on my skill range.
Right now I'm figuring out how to proceed with the shading, I don't think I'll be able to shade it as a normal drawing, since I think I'd actually go crazy if I decided to paint every single frame with that much detail.
It'll certainly be done, since I really like how it's going, but this being my first time properly animating in a while, I'm still doing a lot of limit testing.
This is one of the two animations I'd like to get for the second demo, the other one will most likely be done in Live2D.
ABOUT THE SECOND DEMO
Other than the stuff above, I don't have much to say other than just please have patience with how development goes; I wouldn't say it's harder, than the first demo, but it certainly is trickier.
This time I'm having to rethink and fix things that were done for last update without breaking anything I already had, having to replace assets, scripts and code is just something that requires more thorough action. Good thing is, those are the least things, the first demo made clear that most of the choices I made for the game seem to work really well, the problems being in technical aspects.
What I'm trying to say is that I'm working to make the second demo a quality upgrade similar to what the first demo was to the original project, and this time I can't just get better at drawing or writing to make it work; I have to think, fix and limit test a lot... which is a bother, and it'll take time but at least when I get this demo out, it'll make the full release of the remake way easier.
Thanks for your support again this month, I'll make good use of the "Trust me guys, I'm working" privilege I earned with the first demo.