re:Dreamer Alpha 0.13.2

Edit March 3 2023: Oh, motherfucker, I left this post locked to Patrons only! Sorry about that...

Click here for the download links.

Hey folks, sorry for the delay! I got sick 4 times this month (a nasty cold, some bronchial thing, COVID, and an ear infection), and all of that was on top of my other health issues. The "this update is going to be late" post happened right before I got COVID, and now I have an ear infection! And my GP doesn't have any open appointments for 2 weeks since everyone else is sick now!

Pic related, it's me (or at least, my astral self).

As you might be able to see from the screenshots, re:Dreamer (0.13.2) is a very multifaceted update with a reading time of 1 hour 45 minutes of being left on auto-read with Awkwardness 5 (Awkwardness 4 is what I estimate to be 1 hour 35 minutes and Awkwardness 3 and below at around 1 hour 20 minutes). I went a little hard on it as this Sunday marks the last real time in Britney's route for a long, long while where a single day will be covered in as excessive detail as this (for those not aware, this visual novel is going to be warping forward to set pieces once the important plot points for each route are set in place, since I've shown so much of what is going on with the route that reader imagination is enough to fill in the less important gaps). But anyways, here's the...

Changelog:

• With over 90 minutes of varied new writing, this update follows Zach and Britney on their afternoon after lunch. The important event in it is the first introduction of Zach's aloof and mildly autistic father, who Zach calls up to talk to about him possibly renovating the church next door (he works as the chief restoration agent for what is essentially Zillow). Along the way, Zach gets led into several winding and unexpectedly personal conversations with the man who has been so absent in his life (most are about how much he fucking loves his fucking wife and how much he fucking loves fucking his fucking wife; yes, both parents are like this with Zach). I think the writing here is quite good and really shows "Oh, so this is Zach's dad, and Zach is clearly his son." But is Zach still his son, and would a daughter be able to reconnect with her dad in the same way that a son could? Zach is desperate for a male role model in his life right now since he feels like he needs a guidepost of a father as a reference point for his own masculinity (or lack thereof) and is going to go crazy trying to figure this out on his own.

This is as good of a place as any to state that even at the max Trans settings, Zach is still very hesitant to accept himself (or herself) as a woman named Zoey, for reasons such as:
*Trans 5 Zoey is still an egg and an extremely stubborn individual who does not want to admit that they might be an woman inside and out because she is "supposed" to be a man. She might be a woman, or is she a man who just thinks she wants to be a woman and is going to regret getting stuck as one for the rest of her life? These anxious thoughts of doubt plague Zoey, and going back to being a guy is the path of least resistance. Besides, as Zoey sees it, Ai isn't exactly the most trustworthy "therapist," and her advice could easily be coming from a place of manipulating Zach into being a woman for her perverted game!
*LGBT rights and awareness are about 15-18 years behind in this setting and the government is more conservative, so a person being trans is a much bigger deal than it is in modern America. Zoey in this setting would have to come out as a post-op trans woman with comically large breasts to everyone she knows, and that is an unsavory and even embarrassing thought for her and she's afraid most people would think she's a pervert.
*Acknowledging herself as a woman means Zoey must acknowledge herself as her mother's daughter, which is a frightening prospect as Zoey looks so much like the insane genius who has been trying to live through her child for their entire life and is worried that would give her mom a steroids injection to do that even more. Zoey hasn't realized this, but a lot of her mother's terrible skills as a parent come from the fact that she had geared herself to raise a daughter, had always wanted a daughter, thought she was getting a daughter based on early medical tests when pregnant, and then got a son instead, but she knows something is weird with her mom slightly resenting her existence despite trying very hard not to because, yes, she always wanted a daughter instead. Even if Zoey doesn't let her mom control her life, she still views herself as having to let her into her life more as her daughter since that's how daughters are supposed to be, and that is just a worrying thought with how much their relationship has soured over the years.
*Later on in Britney's route, there are a lot of complicated and overlapping spoiler reasons that essentially boil down to Zoey thinking "Britney would think I am lying about being a woman inside to try and make her like me more" and "I know how Britney is as an ally, and she will throw herself under a bus to defend her girlfriend in a way that she wouldn't defend her boyfriend, and that will have catastrophic consequences for her life."
*Later on in Keisuke's route, Zoey might be placing Keisuke on such a pedestal that she thinks "a guy as wonderful as him deserves a real woman" and is afraid to express femininity around him in case her chivalrous best friend stops seeing his best friend as a man and starts sees a woman he needs to help.
*In Rich's route, Rich's stated goal is to turn Zach into Zoey through and through while helping her survive re:Dreamer, and letting herself accept that is letting Rich win.
*I am trying to mirror the hesitance expressed by some real trans women in regards to their own realization about who they really are. As you might expect, this game has a rather sizeable audience of trans women, primarily in its Discord server. Despite me, the primary creator of this visual novel, being a straight cis male, I have apparently hit a lot of the IRL plot beats for a trans woman struggling with realizing her identity and weighing socially transitioning and fully accepting who she is versus doubting her earlier realization and staying closeted. Nobody has the exact same journey with coming out (and I've seen dozens at this point), and Zoey's is slower and more grueling that most, but if you want an exact estimate of the earliest Zoey realizes she is a woman and fully acknowledges it, the answer is mid-December.
*I need to build up dramatic tension for the first arc of each route, and Zoey having her head buried in the sand about her identity is one of the core ingredients to how I want to do that.
*With Trans 5 specifically, it makes Zoey feel funny and weird to be called a woman in a way that she isn't sure she likes yet. She hasn't yet realized this is validation triggering a rush of gender euphoria yet since she's never felt anything like it, but it makes her head go all fuzzy and is frankly very embarrassing to her how just a few small words make her so flustered. I basically view this as something I witness nearly daily of a trans woman being called cute or receiving validations and reacting with panicked embarrassment. They might say they hate it and deny being cute, but I've seen how much these women crumple under a compliment like that and how cute that is.
*Zoey is the narrator of this visual novel, and they are an unreliable one at that is technically telling the story years after the fact. She is putting a spin on her own story to not just admit "I liked being called a woman named Zoey nearly right from the start" since that's still embarrassing for her to admit even after accepting herself and living as a woman for years.

• Now that this tangent from me answering a question on a forum is out of the way... Additionally, this update fulfills a Sustainer request from Natalie, who requested a girl of the same name make an appearance as Britney's roommate (I can't she's the first person to ask to be in the game). The conversation is relatively brief, but it deals with Zach trying to learn more about Britney's embarrassing middle school personality these girls have known each other since middle school, as well as Britney taking some pads from her for Zoey, and if Britney now knows there's a cost to the hair length changes, taking her salon kit. Britney won't be able to do this for free, however, and she'll have to help Natalie with a bit of her political science homework, which gives her an excuse to talk about how bullshit capitalism is.
• The two main starting paths on Britney's route are now worded to be a lot clearer with what Zach's intentions are (sincere but clueless, or somewhat manipulative).
• The start of the blursed Mom Route got a minor pass of polish to line up a few small lore details.
• An extra line has been added to the Britney Day 2 mall date phone call with Samantha (Zach's mom) where she says she's glad called her again so soon after their call on Friday (which Ai overhears).
• An extra line has been added to the Day 2 Britney mall date ending to say that Britney and Zoey went to what is basically REI for a few cheap plastic bladder water bottles. I said in the date earlier they were getting them, but I forgot to have them say that they had. I also forgot to make Zach buy a resistor for a voltage divider at RadioCity.
• An extra line has been added to the Britney Day 3 salon visit where Zoey states out loud that she looks a lot like her mom (which Ai overhears).
• An extra line has been added to the Britney Day 3 scene where Zach is changing into the new chest binder outside of the church where Britney states it can transform into a regular bra if Zach unzips one zipper and causes some extra fabric to unfurl. It'll be a small but relevant plot detail in the theater should Zach be attending it as a woman.
• The lunch at WcDonald's has a few new lines from Britney to make her stance on America's politics clearer (as well as the contradictions between what she believes and how she lives).
• Zach's mom's name box color has been adjusted from #eb3f3a to #ea3c53 (which this website calls "Desire") to better match the eye color of her upcoming sprites (they're slightly pinker than Zach/Zoey's eyes).
• The hex color code for Zach's blue and pink text is now controlled via a variable. I was mostly just cleaning up code but this could have future applications for changing text slowly over time.
• I forgot to have Zach speak in blue text with Britney's pastor. That's been fixed.
• I changed the current end of Keisuke's route to them just going to an exercise pool with a private reservation since that's more important to plot development than a failed attempt at weightlifting.
• Britney now locks her car. I forgot to give an SFX for that earlier.
• One of Ai's blush layers on her B pose got adjusted a bit. It was too high on her face and got lowered.
• The World Information is now more direct in wording its role as an optional but recommended reading in the intro page and the setting that appears when the game is launched for the first time.
• Also, the World Information entries now have slightly better text layout (greedy word placement and a margin away from the scrollbar) and the scrollbar is now selectable with the arrow keys too, meaning there is full controller support for the screen (as unwieldy as it may be).
• From now on, the flowchart is an SVG as it is too big to export properly as a PNG from diagrams.net without becoming blurred. It should open with most browsers and I have confirmed it works on phones (at least, the file itself does. No idea about the button mention below).
• Clicking the button to open the flowchart no longer breaks every other screen by making every button click open the flowchart again.
• The Android version's quick menu no longer overlaps with the dialogue box when it has more than 4 lines. I don't know how I forgot about this for so long.

Something missing from this changelog that I need to be explicit about is that those new marker masturbation HCGs I mentioned did not get added to this release like I said they would.

I actually finished polishing them up (NSFW Dropbox link) and even used stable-diffusion (and knowing how to fix visual art if not necessarily knowing how to make it) to make a few gender bender doujin covers stored in Zach's drawer under his bed (NSFW Dropbox link), but it's not in-game yet despite being turned into the raw PNG layers it needs for that and downscaled to the right size with Waifu2x-Extension-GUI.

The problem comes from the fact that I need to write two scenes at once if I want to avoid an unfortunate cliffhanger: the masturbation scene rewrites, and a sex scene with Britney related to those doujins.

You see, those doujins are only visible on screen in a drawer for a brief moment, but I put all this work into these small assets because Britney, while trying to be a helpful teacher about menstruation to her clueless boyfriend/girlfriend, opens that drawer to store Zach's pads and tampons so they'll be easy to access and he'll have no excuse not to put them in at night like "I'd have to get up and I'm already under the covers."

And she sees these doujins, but then she sees a visible doujin title, the only one in English, and the jig is up about Zach's gender bender fetish.

Britney starts flipping through these doujins as Zach watches in mortified horror. Britney can't read a word of Japanese (and Zach really doesn't have much knowledge of the language either, but these are rare doujins that only ever got physical releases and he'd be DAMNED if he left them at home for his mom to find and get rid of, even if the rest of his vast collection is digital), but Britney can notice a few things and start asking herself some very important questions:

• Most of the doujins star a girl who looks an awful lot like Zoey, and Zach went out his way to collect these doujins (forwarding fees are no joke and can get very expensive for small-batch orders). "Is that Zach's type? A girl with his black hair and weird red eyes?"
• There are a lot of black-haired girls in these doujins, and a number of redheads, but there's only one blonde character anywhere. "Are blondes like Britney not Zach's type?"
• Most of the doujins are about heterosexual gender bender sex. Only two cover yuri gender bender. "Does Zach self-insert as the genderbent girl? Is Zach bi?"
• (NSFW link) That blonde character, who is in one of the two yuri gender bender doujins, looks an awful lot like Britney (and even has her top!), and the girl on the doujin cover she's straddling and pinning down with her hips, thighs, and calf looks an awful lot like Zoey. "Does Zach want to be Zoey, and does Zoey want me to do that to her?"

Britney, the ever-talented cosplayer, actress, and chuuni that she is, knows a good opportunity when she sees it. She doesn't even need to change her clothes to cosplay this girl; she doesn't know Japanese, but she knows how to look at pictures and figure out the flow of what this blonde girl is doing this girl with black hair, and she's delusional enough to act out her interpretation of this character just from the pictures. Britney's never been one to stick to a script anyways, and as Zach is about to find out, she's a very talented improv actress with a great method acting skills.

In other words, Britney is in a jealous rage, and she's going to vent her frustrations by to topping the everloving shit out of Zach as she plays out a gender bender doujin she barely skimmed. Zach takes his porn almost as seriously as I do, but is he really going to shut up and let Britney mess up the story of one of his favorite doijins, or is he going to be a pedant and dig his hole deeper by teller Britney her part and assuming his, all to live out an erotic roleplay fantasy?

That is a scene I am beyond excited to write, but it'll be next month, on the 7th, and this update is out now because I'd otherwise be biting off far more than I could chew.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go curl up under the bed and be sick.