Next Step

I hope everyone has had a chance to take a look at the game.  I mentioned that it was a "very" initial release and I've gotten some really good feedback.  Some changes are coming to the current content.

Firstly, there's going to be music soon.  I was going to put some in the initial release but I hit a couple hiccups, threw a little temper tantrum about it and childishly decided to put it off.  Not my proudest moment but ultimately, I'm glad I bit the bullet and got something out for people to see.

I got some comments about the MC's general appearance and the way he doesn't display much emotion.  Turns out those two things were connected, the model I was using just kind of looked weird when you gave him any kind of facial expression.  So I've got freshly built MC that I think looks close to the original but doesn't look like he belongs on a watchlist. 

Outside a few of the spicier scenes he's not on camera a whole lot yet so changing models at this stage isn't going to completely derail development.  It will mean it's going to take a little longer to get truly new content out for you guys and I apologize for that.

Speaking of spicier scenes, I'm listening to another suggestion and frontloading some of the adult content.  This is part of me reworking the very initial scenes.  I'm going to cut out a lot of the technobabble exposition.  I never liked it in the first place and it only got added because I didn't have enough trust in my audience.  So details will be a little lighter about how exactly some of the made up sciencey stuff works.  If players end up getting confused or lost it will be easy to add in some extra explanations as the game goes.

The lighting of some of the scenes was brought up by some players and I tend to agree.  I was trying to do some stuff to make a stark visual distinction between the "real" world and the simulations but if it's at the expense of overall art quality then it's not worth it.  I am not going to go back and redo the renders for every night scene though, it would just take way too long and the game would essentially be on hold.  So as a bandaid solution for the stuff that's already in the game I'm going to adjust the images I already have to try and brighten them up.  Here are some real quick examples of before and after.

Thanks for reading and I'd love to hear any additional comments about the game.  Here's a quick teaser for the revamped intro scene as a reward for reading all that. (Skipping to bottom is cheating and you should be ashamed of yourself)

I'm sure you guys can imagine how that scene will play out.