Weekly News #109

Another week and a half have passed since the last news release. This means only one thing - the time of the release of the new issue, which will tell what we have done in such a short time, but first we need to talk about some other things regarding the development of the game.

First, the development goals on Patreon. We remember them and are going to fulfill everything in full. So far, there has been a slight increase of money, but most of it is due to the past action. By the next month, the amount of money may decrease to the previous values, which will ultimately make it impossible to achieve the goal without overworking the people working for us. Now, we are waiting for the end of April to understand exactly what will happen with budget stability - this is quite an important thing when it comes to big mechanics that a certain number of people will work on an ongoing basis. In addition, dear subscribers who have bought a Life-Time Subscription do not forget to unsubscribe from the patron page so that you will not be charge an extra amount by the next month.

Secondly, despite the first reasons, we are increasing the number of people working on the game, and reviewing the work of those who are already working on it. In the near future, we are going to increase the amount of work to a certain scale in order to be ready for, firstly, the full fulfillment of our goals, and secondly, to generally accelerate the development of the game. In the near future, as soon as any backbone related to story moments, moments with randomized NPCs is ready, as soon as the budgets increase even more - we will discuss porting the game to another engine in parallel with the current development without stopping the set pace. Now, we need at least $7,500 per month on Patreon to do this. However, more about this will be discussed a little later, when the time comes.

Thirdly, one of the most common questions - when will the game be released? At the moment, many of the game's systems are already barely working on many devices due to limitations of the game engine. The game requires a transfer to a new one in order to be able to do everything planned, so from this moment you can start counting: firstly, it is quite possible that the development of the RenPy version to its full version will take 2–3 years, taking into account that budgets will keep at the same level. Exactly this much time will be required to complete the storylines, all the main mechanics and systems. After that, minor updates are possible: the interface, additional storylines and other things. Roughly speaking, even in its significant version, the game will support by new content for a long time. Secondly, other options for the development of events, taking into account the release of the game on a new version of the engine - here everything will already depend on the budget. The very release of the game, taking into account all the current mechanics, systems and other things, can take a year or a little less time. At the moment, it is difficult to conduct any analytics about the second option, so as it is. What about the release of the game on Steam - this will happen anyway and everyone who wants to receive the game keys after. However, everything depends on the same budget: for this, we still have a lot of work to do and hire an additional artist to get rid of some problems.

Well, now that we have sorted out some plans, we can deal with what has already been done, so... Let's start.

First, randomized NPCs. The most important innovation here concerns the main processing and refactoring of the definition of their appearance. We've worked on this, and also added a new mechanic - the ability to change the color of clothes on randomized NPCs. How it looks can be seen below:

Everything is now limited by your imagination, as well as... A set of clothes. Unfortunately, not everything is adapted for this function. This also includes another innovation using this innovation: we have done a little work on the most stable colors and colors, adding them to the general generation list, which in the end will slightly increase the level of diversity in the game.

In addition, it also includes behavior adjustments, a redesigned randomized NPC generator, and some other things that, as a result, should improve the gaming experience...

Secondly, the plot. And... Everything is simple here: more changes to existing storylines regarding Suzuki and Yuki, as well as new events with a new possible roommate - Robert The Cockroach. Of course, this includes some other innovations/changes, but more about them closer to the release of the new update.

Thirdly, a new background. A demonstration will suffice here:

Fourth, bug fixes. Well, here is the full list of changes for this week and a half:

New content:

- The story events with Suzuki Matsui been slightly redone: the initial dialogues have been modified, new choices have been added that affect the course of the story, some old choices have been removed, and in general, the storyline now looks a little better.

- Changed and reworked some of the new Ayano Yoshida events to match the current standards: now you can play your character through multiple choices. If you didn’t like his character before, prescribed at the very beginning, now you can safely move away from it and play something else.

- Added a new feature to the Randomized NPC Editor: Recolor existing outfits to any color. This have done by entering the RGB code in the appropriate tab in the editor. All clothes divided into the lower part and the upper part, which will increase the number of available options and scope for imagination. This is currently only available for randomized female NPCs, as well as for Patreon subscribers who have a subscription higher than or equal to the level of Best Friend ($10), for a while, until the end of testing this feature.

- Now certain sets of clothes are generated in different colors: there are more than a dozen of them, they are selected depending on the type of randomized girl NPC and other factors.

- Now certain sets of clothes are generated in different colors: there are more than a dozen of them, they are selected depending on the type of randomized girl NPC and other factors

- Added new events to the storyline for Robert The Cockroach.

- New appearance settings have been added to the appearance editor of the main character, and old, no longer relevant ones have been removed.

- A complete refactoring of the system for generating relationships with randomized NPCs was carried out: the entire code was completely rewritten and instead of random values, character, gender and many other factors now have a significant weight on it. All his individual characteristics will be taken into account during the distribution of initial relations with other NPCs: NPCs with the same character and hobbies will stray into small groups, arrogant ones will hate everyone and everything, and aggressive ones will love only one thing - strength.

- The system responsible for determining clothes/sleeves for these same clothes for randomized female NPCs has been refactored: now the code responsible for this is much faster, more stable, and in general, it looks much better than what it was before. It concerns both the code in the editor of randomized NPCs, and the code that is used in the gameplay of the game itself.

- The module responsible for determining the weight of items in the inventory has been slightly refactored: now all calculations are much more accurate. In addition, some bugs and shortcomings related to this area of the game have been fixed.

- Minor refactoring of the module for calculating the time of day was carried out: some global variables were changed, scripts were changed at some points, which will speed up their loading and improve performance. In addition, some exceptions related to this module that pop up during a long game session have been fixed.

- A minor refactoring of the module responsible for the mechanics of the journalism club was carried out. There should be a lot less problems with this mechanic now.

- Some redundant repetitive code sections have been removed, and some have been merged into one function, which saves the game from some of the errors associated with these moments: miscalculations, outdated data, exceptions and other problems.

- A new location interaction has been added to the Beach location - sunbathing. When used, your character's attractiveness is increased by 50% for 24 hours.

- Changed the limit required to use a medkit from 29 health per limb to 39 health.

- Increased the time window when the student council meeting event should drop, so there shouldn't be any problems due to which this event could not drop for whole weeks. In addition, almost all existing events have slightly increased the time intervals of availability.

- A new feature has been added to the subscriber's Patreon menu: change Patron code.

- The background of the location where student council meetings are held was completely redrawn. In addition, a new version of the time of day was added there - night.

- Some unnecessary files have been removed from the game folder, and some parts of the code have been moved to different places, which will improve their overall appearance and design.

- Added new animations to the existing game interface.

Fixes bugs:

- Fixed some bugs in the main menu.

- Fixed a bug due to which not all RNPCs were given relationship/affection/fear points during the acquisition of a perk/item that bound obtaining this.

- Fixed a bug due to which the function of calculating the chance of an event drop could not take into account all variables, which is why it worked incorrectly.

- Fixed minor bugs in the module for distributing randomized NPCs by locations of their clubs/type of activity.

- Fixed a bug due to which randomized male NPCs could spawn a gachі costume in a game session in the form of a preference in clothing without using cheats/RNPC editor.

- Fixed all the bugs and shortcomings of the generation of the main character: now the whole appearance generates, as it should.

- Fixed some bugs and shortcomings related to the appearance of male randomized NPCs of the new type: now all the details displayed, as they should, without any problems.

- Fixed an issue where satiety could be a non-integer number. In addition, the general starting stats have been changed: the maximum satiety level has been lowered in the early stages of the game.

- Fixed a bug that could cause the grocery store to run out of certain types of food at the start of a game session.

- Fixed some issues where the game could incorrectly calculate your character's attributes at certain points in the game.

- Fixed the performance of some perks in the game: now everything works as it should.

- Fixed a bug where some Randomized NPC Influence stats would not always have time to load when interacting with them.

- Fixed some typos in the Russian translation of the game.

- Fixed errors in the English translation of the game in some moments: inaccuracies, lack of translation at certain points, typos and exceptions that occur in very rare cases.

- Fixed bugs related to the incorrect calculation of some statistics related to the mechanics of fights.

- Fixed a bug that could cause an exception to be thrown when using certain interactions with randomized NPCs.

- Fixed a bug due to which an exception could occur during a long game session, provided that the story with the journalism club was completed and the mechanics of managing this club were open.

As you can see, we are moving further along the development vector you have given us and will continue to move on. In the near future we will tell about our slightly less distant plans, but for now all that remains to be done is to wait for the release of a new full-fledged version, which will be released, as always, on March 27th. No changes or transfers.