what was the plan for the next update anyway?
They haven't reported anything new yet.
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(This is a long and probably pretty dry post about the truly unreasonable volume of art-logistics and coding horseshit that a VN requires. If that doesn't sound like your thing, feel free to skip! There are no 100%-completion-trophies to be found here.)
Man, how does every single thing take so damned long?
Come along with me, and I'll show you!~~
Art
Let's take our latest heroine, Mallory, as our example.
Mallory herself has about a hundred mood sprites, in four different costumes. Then she has a cast of supporting characters—Angela, Valerie, Gretchen, Claire, Acolyte—all of whom need their own mood sprites, often in multiple costumes. Each of these is illustrated by our lead artist xxxx52, when he's not working on our splash pages or whatever else bespoke horseshit we ask of him.
Then we need the custom face sprites for the close-ups and overlays—such as the Demetria faceoff and the Claire hot tub scene. Those are unique assets which can't be re-used anywhere else. (And of course we also need the base pages for those custom face sprites.)
Then, we need high-resolution splash pages for the sex. Usually there's a few progressions of each sex splash (such as Rye putting dildos into the player on Claudia's route.)
And we need to pay someone to make the backgrounds for the scenes, of course. We send these off to a dedicated background illustrator, who has a 3-7 day turnaround, unless he's very busy.
Then, animation! This requires a lot of back and forth, in which we say "idk could she pound him harder", and then later "
nah man, even harder". This takes about a week, unless an artist forgot to put everything on separate layers, in which case we basically need to illustrate it all over again.
And then it goes to our second animator, for the pop shots, creampies, and fluids. This takes at least another week to get back to us, unless he just doesn't get back to us at all, sigh.
(We miss you, Sijix, hope you're ok.)
Writing
My writing speed averages between 250-500 words per hour. I acknowledge this is not fast, but also, my first draft is usually also my only draft, which I hear is unusual for writers.
The Mallory path is 120,000 words.
Usually, if a writer writes a book in a year—"book" here being an unillustrated story of 50,000-100,000 words—that's considered a strong showing. We put out the Mallory path in 6 months, and unlike a traditional book, it also performs
intercourse with the
reader.
Wow!
One thing which is pretty challenging about the serial release format is that we can't go back and edit plotlines. Every release, I have regrets, where I would've loved to
go back and foreshadow certain elements harder, or maybe just delete a character who isn't pulling their narrative weight, or add an extra scene of raucous dicking.
But, alas! The story is live, and now we need to write an ending, given the beginning which is canonized.
Coding and UX
And then we hunt down music from Copyright Free Youtube, find the least generic sounding stuff, and edit it so that it creates a sense of space. (Such as the through-the-wall, muffled-bass sound as you're on the job with Cookie, or the big echoey sound of the MIF warehouse.)
Then we add sound effects, such as the meat ripping SFX as Mallory tears off her skin and metamorphoses into a god and ascends into the sky.
Then, at some point, we need to code all this into a game.
Then we need to do stage direction for where the characters are on the screen. It looks pretty stupid if they're just all physically overlapping in the center! This requires a lot of playtesting, and coding custom transformations if you want anything more complicated than “exit stage left”. For example, when Bad Cop Claudia stomps on an unconscious Artemis, that half-second animation required a half hour of coding.
Then we have to playtest the game, because it will have a lot of bugs and unexpected behavior. Any time we want a choice which contains other nested choices, or non-linear gameplay like Rye Part Two, that takes coding attention. (Putting aside the constant tax of “Python updated, so your dev environment is now mysteriously ruined in a way which will require hours to fix”)
. There could be ntr mixed in it as well, a futa with a bbc stealing you from another.
