I've uploaded to Itch.io! You can find the project here. Please keep in mind, this is just a prologue, introductions to the most important characters. There'll be much more to come. Please please please, if you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it! Anything goes, but I'm most interested in people's thoughts on the character models, rendering style, and shot style for CGs.

Note as well, that the "hospital" scene, the "car" scene, and the "memoirs" scene don't have any visuals yet, I just didn't feel like they were worth the effort this early in development.

⭐ Tribulations:

As I've been working on this prologue, I've been prompted with some rather severe problems regarding my workflow. Performance in Blender is just so ass, right now I'm having to limit myself to 2 characters per scene, any more than that and it's just not feasible. Cloth sim has also continued to be a problem, but with some more tweaks at least it's somewhat stable now.

There was also just a ton of bug fixing on the characters. Really stupid shit that I hadn't caught. And there's still some stuff I've gotta fix. 

I think, in the future, I might lean more into the sprite side of things, it'd be so easy to script and get a bunch of good variations. It'd also make re-rendering much easier. Just a little couple hundred batch renders per character, if things are set up properly.

⭐ Expressions:



Speaking of sprites. So uh... Each of the characters (thus far) has 43 unique facial expressions. Or well. 14 expressions and 3 intensities per. I'm considering these "base expressions," as follows:

• angry
• happy
• sad
• surprised
• scared
• confused
• embarrassed
• knowing
• focused
• flirty
• horny
• bliss
• sleepy
• pained

I'll maybe add 5 character specific expressions for each of the heroines, as even these don't really give a full spread for any of them. I kinda like the subtlety afforded by the intensities, what do y'all think? Do any of the expressions standout as needing more work?

Of course, the dynamism might seem low as of right now, but once I get some extra key poses in, it should really start to go silly.

⭐ IWC Editor:



The bigger coding thing I did this time around was make a text editor for Atelis's IWC Device. It's kinda janky, but it works. I felt like this was somewhat necessary for getting more insight into Atelis and his feelings on the other characters, as I have a self imposed limitation of a very strict Third Person Objective style. No internal thoughts, scant narration. Hopefully these scenes don't drag on too long. There'll be a couple throughout the story, but not all of the nitty gritty will be shown. Sometimes, Atelis will work on... it... off screen. So you'll only see the way that he edits and rewrites his text after the fact.

It'd be kind of cool to get a mock rich text thing going with it. But I guess I'll save that for much later.

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I want to thank anyone who tries out the game. Admittedly, there has been some procrastination involved. Some Deltarune. Some Riverdale. I've been working on this for so long, even if it doesn't seem like it right now. I feel like a weight of some kind is being lifted by simply having it out there. But... there will be hard times to come.