Ok, sorry about the delay, I got to the end of the month and decided to add a little more on to the end of the 0.1 to make it end with a bit more of a "something is going on" kinda vibe. It ended kinda abruptly before I added the extra bit. Anyway, lemme explain what it is. (Don't pay too much mind to the banner image. It's basically just some shit I threw together in a few minutes after work today, since I figured I might as well show one of the main girls.
Don't pay too much mind to this. It's just a quick promo image I threw together after work today. I'll probably make a better one later.
In Studio Hearts, you play as Marcus (Or a custom name), a 30 year old Capital Raising Associate living and working in London. He doesn't get too much time for a personal life as a result of work, and approximately three years before the start of the story, he finds himself filling the void by talking to a camgirl, Mila, whose name can also be customised. She's a 22 year old woman who's been solo camming since shortly after her 18th birthday, with it subtly or not so subtly affecting almost all aspects of her life. Her goals, friendships, and even her personality have all been influenced by her work.
Over time, she becomes closer to Marcus than any of her other viewers. Close enough to reveal her real location, which she usually keeps secret for her own safety. She lives in the fictional Russian speaking country of Kharzovya, which whilst western in many ways, is also very culturally distinct from what Marcus is used to, especially with respect to how they view relationships.
One day, Marcus is a presented with a work opportunity that would have him moving out of London, and it's from there that the story begins...
As you can guess from that description, this isn't a story of mystery and intrigue, or big lofty grand conspiracy where you have to uncover the truth and defeat the big bad guy. It's closer to slice of life, with the focus being more on day to day character interactions, and where life ends up leading you and the other characters. Though just like real life, it's unlikely the characters will be able to live entirely drama free...
Since pretty much everyone reading this will be reading it because they played Stormside, I'll explain the similarities and differences in some bullet points below. There's quite a lot of detail here, so if you don't care and you just want to try it, check the bottom of the post regarding download links. (Spoiler though, they're sub only at the moment)
- Studio Hearts is a harem game, just like Stormside. It does however have a reduced main cast. Side characters (when introduced) may or may not get sexual content of their own, and until they do they can be considered supporting characters, rather than secondary LIs.
- Studio Hearts is fully linear at the moment. I may consider some branching later on, but part of the point of making this is me still wanting to make something, while not really being able to do the branching that Stormside had anymore, so for now at least it's fully linear. The 0.1 still includes some choices which will be relevant later, but nothing close to the extent that they mattered in Stormside. This should allow me to make it MUCH faster. (Hell, I threw this 0.1 together in about a month, and while that's largely because a lot of the code was carried over from Stormside, and I was off work for the whole month, that's still much faster than I could make any kind of Stormside update.)
- Unlike Stormside, which was in 1080p, Studio Hearts is in 1440p. I wanted to do 4k, but the filesize was gonna be disgusting, so I settled right in the middle. It's also built on RenPy 8 instead of 7, which doesn't really matter, but I figured I might as well make it on the latest version. Frustratingly this has broken the translation effect I used in Stormside, but I'm sure I'll be able to fix that some time after the 0.1 release. (For now if someone's speaking something other than English, it'll just be labeled as such)
- Unlike Stormside, Studio Hearts doesn't have a focus on BDSM and punishment. These things are still planned to be present, but not to the same extent as Stormside, and not under the same context at all. I plan to make that content partially optional, depending on the exact context and intensity of the scene, but it isn't actually present in the 0.1 version.
- Unlike Stormside, main characters are not optional. You have to follow their stories, because a lot of the planned dialogue and events won't really make any sense if you don't. Side characters (Once introduced) will have a simple yes or no choice with regard to accessing their content if they have any. They'll still appear either way since they're supporting characters who are there for story reasons, but if I make sexual content for those characters, it will be a one time opt in or out for each one.
- I doubt this will matter to anyone, but unlike Stormside, Studio Hearts is written in British English. I did this because I was getting so used to typing in American English that it was starting to show up in my IRL work emails, and it was weirding out my coworkers when I would spell things the American way accidentally. This is also sort of related to why I made the main character British this time. It just makes it easier for me to write his dialogue without having to google whether what he was saying was something an American would actually say. For anyone who didn't know, I'm British, so writing an American character using American English for the last few years has inflicted hundreds of points of psychic damage upon me.
- Like Stormside, there is lesbian content planned. However, unlike Stormside, this content is planned to be unavoidable in certain instances. I realise that's a dealbreaker for some people, so I'm telling you up front. For the most part, this is a game where you get what you're given, and you either like it, or you don't.
- Like Stormside, the characters are still "voiced" in the sex scenes. It's basically the same deal, with it all being Japanese VA moaning and stuff. Still muteable of course if you don't want to hear that kind of thing.
- This is a weird comparison, but like Stormside, the early game makes heavy use of the phone and other forms of instant messaging, except this time it's due to the nature of your relationship with the main LIs, rather than how it was in Stormside where I basically just made a phone system from scratch a week after first opening RenPy, and ended up overusing it. (I'm using the same phone system, but with some enhancements like the ability to click images in texts and fullscreen them.)
- A lot of the audio assets are reused from Stormside. There will be new stuff of course, but you'll recognise certain music tracks and sound effects. I'm not likely to go looking for new sound effects just for the sake of using new ones, but will do if what I already have isn't appropriate.
- I kept the sex stats thing in the game, except this time it has no in game explanation like the collars from Stormside. It's just kinda there because I already had the code for it, and it's kinda fun. They also don't display stats previous to when you meet characters, since I didn't want to deal with that this time.
- AI content declaration. Part way through making it I realised that some of the city cubemaps I was using for backgrounds were most likely AI generated. I plan to keep using them for consistency, and because I don't have better cubemaps available, but it's apparently in vogue to declare that kind of thing at the moment. Also, some of the random livestream comments were generated by AI so that I didn't have to manually type out hundreds of variations of "Show me your bobs pretty lady" and stuff like that.
I think that's all there really is to mention at the moment. So I'll give a little detail about the 0.1 itself.
- At present, only two of the main characters are introduced. I expect with the main characters it'll stay this way for a few updates, as these two are like the MAIN main characters.
- There's also only one gallery scene, simply because I was kinda scrambling to throw it all together in a month. The next update should remedy this issue though, since this 0.1 is just to set things up. Once I get the Stormside content released finally, the next SH update should show that just like Stormside, this game is porn first, story second.
- 850ish renders, 75 animations/videos, no idea how many lines of code or dialogue lines. It probably takes 1-2 hours to play through, but I haven't actually played through it at a normal pace, so I'm not actually sure how long it is. (I played after work yesterday for testing, but I'd stop frequently to rework dialogue lines and stuff like that, so it took far longer than I expect it'd take a normal player.)
With all that being said, I will reiterate one point since I'm fairly sure it's gonna be a dealbreaker for some people. This is a game which centers around camming as a profession, and it will feature some of the stuff that comes with that. While you're not gonna be getting cucked or anything like that, you are gonna have to deal with the fact that some of the LIs will be working, and that means they might have to appear interested in other men at times. It's kinda just part of the job.
If you're not ok with that, don't play this.
Anyway, I'll put the download links in a seperate post since I wanted the details public, but access to the actual download to be for those who have stuck around this long. It would feel unfair to them not to do it that way. I'll release it in the same tier structure as before, with professor and above getting it now, student on the 16th, then public on the 23rd. I'll have to think of some new names and restructure the tiers at some point before the actual public release. In fact, I'm gonna have to do a lot of promotional shifting things around, but that can wait until I release this thing on itch (Assuming they'll take it. I picked a terrible time for all this lmao)
I'm back at my normal job as of a week ago, but now that this is out, I'm gonna see about getting the unreleased Stormside content packaged up and released.
