I Live! (Also - Masturbating Mira)

Alright, so I'm finally back. Technically, I was back yesterday (errr, day before yesterday? The 29th at any rate, it's technically after midnight so...) but I was pretty wiped out. Anyway, let me update you a bit on where things are.

1) The Elven Maid - I did get some time to brainstorm a bit with Jaylee. I did not, however, have enough time/energy to write a full new section. As such, no extra reward this time. On the other hand, if it gets chosen for August, it will likely come much earlier in the month than usual, since I do already have plans and sections done.

2) Sexy Cosplay Cafe Art - This is the reason I didn't get much writing done. When I left town, I still had 4 pieces I needed done. So I took my terrible laptop and bare-bones newbie drawing tablet along with me. With some major pain and suffering, I was able to get two of the four pieces I still needed mostly finished (They were only missing the shading, which I just finished for this piece and will do the variant here soon). With the attached piece for this post, plus a variant of it, that leaves me with just two remaining pieces. I intend to have the line art for one of those done before I crash tonight, meaning that I can do the color for it tomorrow fairly easily. With a little luck, I may get the last piece mostly done as well.

With those finished, I will officially have all the art I planned to have for the first build of the game ready. There will be some need to alter various expressions I'm sure, and I still haven't found a usable placeholder for the one location I mentioned before. Given that said location doesn't really feature all that heavily in the first build of the game, I'm reluctant to make the art for it (places being the most time consuming for me to make, but FAR), but I might have to. There's also the possibility that I will run into a place that I didn't consider I needed an art piece for. For these reasons I can't say 100% that I won't need to make more art, but the art I planned to need will be finished. The final total, including a couple of minor variants, will be 33 images. Which doesn't sound impressive compared to the sort of numbers I crank out for Eros Academy...but hand-drawn visual novels don't use/require anywhere near the crazy number of images I've made for Eros. 

3) The Sexy Cosplay Cafe Development - With the art finished, August 1st is going to see the start of actually piecing the first game build together. I have about 95% of the initial build pre-planned, but I still haven't played with the new software I want to use instead of Renpy. While Renpy is powerful in a way...the truth is that I fucking hate it. Mostly because some absolute moron, somewhere, thought it was a good idea to use white space formatting as a key component of it's supposedly user-friendly language. Which is very literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen regarding any programming or scripting language, ever. And keep in mind this is coming from someone with an actual degree in software design. The fact that I'm mostly a C/C++/C# programmer, and one of the very first things my very first instructor told us was that he'd fail us if he ever saw us using a 'Goto' command....and Renpy's all-important 'jump' command is exactly the same command... Well that doesn't help either. But enough ranting.

The plan is to use an actual paid VN builder program called TyranoBuilder. But I haven't actually run the technical tests I need yet. Oh, I did a super simple test early last month...but I haven't done a technical demo test that will prove it can do all the things I need it so. Namely, I needed to figure out if it can painlessly handle an in-game calendar and regular variable checks. It doesn't seem to handle them by default (which makes me question the sanity of the people that made it, as well, since that's a pretty damn common VN feature), so checking so see how hard it will be do do those things will be the first order of business. Once I figure that out (and hopefully stay with the software, rather than having to find yet another options) I'll start putting the whole thing together. My ideal goal is to put the build out mid-August. However, as I simply don't know yet what sorts of issues I'm going to run into with the software, I'm only actually committing to having it out by the end of August.