Because then there would be no game.
The events of the prologue lead to the main theme of the game: Guy using his money to help people in need (in the good guy route) or abuse them (in the bad guy route).
Yeah, I've always stood by my initial stance that, without the sexual component of his meeting with Nicki, Guy would never feel that strong impetus to form a charity, and set the events of the game in motion. And I felt it would make Nicki's three-month absence less meaningful, in some ways. Having your best friend disappear after you either sleep with her or take advantage of her is one thing, but having her just dip out entirely after you helped her and asked for/gained nothing in return felt a little harder to explain.
But, I am coming around to the idea of making a friends-only path with Nicki, which would dovetail into her friend path that picks up in the beginning of Chapter Four. It'd require some extra writing and renders for a new path in Chapter Three and Four, and some consideration regarding where to allow players to re-integrate into the other possible paths, but I think it's doable. Right now all of Nicki's and MC's interactions assume a base-level of intimacy that makes them comfortable/apathetic to being at least partially naked around each other. So it'd need to be explained away to use existing renders, or I'd need to put them both in clothes. Or give them alternate interactions entirely, which could honestly be the path of least resistance.
So, we'll see. Not promising anything for now, but it might be nice to have a longer friends-to-lovers/bang-assistant track, now that more of the game is in place. When I wrote the first chapter, it wasn't a sure thing that the rest of the story would be told - I didn't have a PC that could run Daz effectively, I didn't know how to
use Daz, and my ability to code a serialized story was definitely in question. As things have come together, it makes a little more sense to potentially give players the options of keeping Nicki as purely a friend.
Plus, I kind of like writing the platonic stuff anyways.. The other day I sketched out a loose idea for a scene involving Gabby friendship route, which I think will be really cute, once I get around to it.
I can't wait to see more of Brittani with I
Current plan is to have her reappear in Chapter Five, setting up her next big event in Chapter Six. I'd also like to write in a little bit where MC and reach out to her via the phone to show her how the photos came out. I already put them up on my Patreon, but it'd be cool to put them in-game, too.
I kinda wish people would try to do their own VN/KN just once to see how complicated it gets if you get too ambitious.
You also forgot to add in when you update your NVIDIA Studio driver and DForce decides not to work, but you don't know it was the update because you haven't rendered in a few days
Oh that shirt that you've been using in over 50+ renders? Whoops, it now crashes Daz Studio
Keep telling people how it is! There is a limit when you are a one person dev team.
Hah! Yeah, I don't remember if I talked about it, but I updated to the new version of Daz mid-way through Chapter Four's rendering (because it suddenly began crashing all the time), and it broke some things that I suddenly had to work around - but it did stop crashing! Still, not ideal and not fun.
Speaking of onerous little game-dev problems, I made a bunch of these cellphone screens for pop-up text conversations throughout the game, only to realize the time displayed at the top of each didn't work for the scenes that required them. Hoping I can get them implemented for the next build, since I think they look better than displaying the text in the chatbox.
