December Devlog

This month has been really busy for me, so I haven't had a lot of time to focus on gamedev. Fortunately, I have a bit of a backlog of things to talk about so, let's go into some of my various projects this month! 

The Blind Date Game

This project isn't particularly popular at the moment. The recent dating beta has received no feedback at all, so I may scale back the project so that I can move on to future projects sooner. I've always had this project designed as something that is scalable depending on interest and difficulty, so this isn't a big issue of course. The most important thing is that the skills I've gained while developing this odd game have made me significantly more confident in future projects up ahead.

The game's not dead, but I have taken some time off of it this month while I've been busy with holiday commissions and the Pokegirl comic. I'm hoping to have more to show you all next month from this as I work on a visual upgrade and modding support for dates. 

Please give the latest beta a shot and send me your thoughts on it!

AutoVN

AutoVN is a small project that I've been making in Godot with my spare time. The premise is that it can take any text and pair it with an image to create a visual novel style reading experience.

What the program does is display your provided text line by line in the same way a visual novel would present it. To do this, it parses through the text using punctuation to know when to finish the current line (with edge cases for quotation marks and the like) . I've found it to be especially helpful with my bad habit of skipping ahead when reading fanfiction, light novels and the like.

It's not very advanced, but at the moment it supports loading text and images from files and from URLs. Above, you can see an example of the various reading modes the project supports. You're free to swap between these as you read, hopefully making for a more customizable experience.

While the basic project is functional, I think it'll be a while before I have a publishable build ready. I want to add more display options (fonts, pagination, colors, texture support, etc) as well as some added functionality for bookmarking your progress or basic VN scripting (to play music & sounds). 

Eventually, I'd also like to use this project for an interactive art pack, where all the art would have custom made stories built for this project. I think that'd be a fun way to demonstrate the functionality while also giving you all something (probably lewd) to enjoy.

(2024 update: Since Godot 4's release, AutoVN is not being actively developed.)
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I also have a bunch of miscellaneous projects I've been tweaking behind the scenes. Date a Mink 3D is one of these, but I've also been working on concept for the game Lisa is from (expect some new characters soon) as well as a Pokemon parody I've been planning and a Phantasy Star inspired RPG I hope to make (I'm thinking of calling it "Stellar Fantasy") . 

Next week, I'll be doing the big 100th weekly art poll! I'm thinking that'll be a big poll featuring all of my girls, but beyond that, don't expect anything too crazy. I'll likely just be doing a classic on/off pic of the winner.

I'm hoping to focus more time into gamedev after the holidays, so I hope you all are looking forward to next month's updates. It'll be a new year, so have a stress-free holidays and thanks for all of your support this year!