D.E. Vane's Domain

Good news:  I've completed parts 1-4 so far.  Rough drafts, obviously, but the story's in place generally speaking. Bad news:  There are now 6 parts, not including the 'endgame'.  Plus, I still haven't done any work on the real art yet. I expect to have most of the rough draft finished in a week or two unless I burn out again.  I'm not sure that's as much of a problem with Ren'Py, though, since I can play through the game piece by piece as I make it and the whole process is satisfying in immediate and obvious ways. To be continued.

I've made a bit of progress with the VN, though it's already become quite a much bigger project than I thought it was going to be.  It's definitely going to be more than 'a few weeks'.  Hopefully it won't be more than a couple of months, though, since I don't plan to include as much sexual content (and thereby, rendered animations) as the other one. I've got all of the major stand-in art done, and I've written up the basic plot outline, the characters and the gameplay system(s) used -- at least, as far as they're possible in Ren'Py.  I've also written Part 1 of five, though more parts may be added and most of those are introductory in nature anyway, so there's still quite a lot of writing ahead. Still, learning the ropes.  Who knows how far I'll be in a week or two.

I've decided that I'm going to take a short break from my 'main' project and work on something else for a few weeks.  That's not to say that I might not work on it a bit every here or there, but I'm going to focus my efforts on something else for a little while. Specifically, I've decided that I want to make a short game in Ren'py .  It's an engine you're probably familiar with if you're a fan of visual novels, but for the uninitiated, well... it's a thing that lets you make visual novels.  Whew!  Made it through the intro, wasn't sure I would. Why Ren'py?  It's easy, cross-platform and good for what it does.   Akabur uses it, as do many, many, many other people, and 10,000 wolves can't be wrong as they say.  I don't think I'll be using it for my main thing, since half the point of that is just the fun of developing shit by hand, but for simpler stuff it looks like it should work quite nicely. So, what am I ...

Earlier today, I decided to go a different direction with the idea of a 'journal editor,' instead splitting its functionality across a myriad of other application-appropriate editors.  For example, journal entries about characters go in the Character Editor, quest entries go in the Quest Editor, etc..  I haven't actually implemented any of this, of course, but I'll get around to it. That being said, there were a few categories which didn't quite fit anywhere else.  To address this, I went ahead and made an 'Info editor.'  That doesn't seem like a particularly good name for it, but I can't think of anything better so I guess that's that. Thankfully, the type of data being messed with is all very similar; identical actually, except for its parent category.  This means the editor was dead easy to write compared to basically everything else I've done.  Only about a 1000 lines of code, and I bet a more competent programmer could probably squee...

Well!  That was certainly a much bigger pain in the ass than I thought it would be. Only a couple more editors and then I can start on the content itself.

Development has been slow for the past week or two; in addition to becoming a bit burnt out on the project, other things have come up which took precedence. That being said, development has more-or-less returned to normal for the past couple of days.  I've figured out how the 'sex system' will work in-game and the editor's about 85% done, I'd estimate.  Probably be finished with it tomorrow or the next day. Incidentally, here's a picture of a butt I whipped up a couple of days ago: I haven't nailed down the aesthetic yet.  I think this is generally the look I'm after, but I'll have to check out how other details look before I make any final decisions, especially the faces. If you want to make one for yourself, it's not too bad:   Blender is the primary modeling tool used, though the character model itself was generated/tweaked/etc. with Manuel Bastoni 's blender plugin.  Give it a shot, it's easier than it looks.