re:Dreamer Alpha 0.10.4

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Sorry for the delay! As detailed in Friday Update #28, Mother's Day festivities made chances to work on the game this update cycle hard to come by, and I got a minor bout of food illness last night that made me lurch over the toilet for a few hours; all of this together meant that the release wasn't polished on time for Friday night.

re:Dreamer (0.10.4) finishes the jogging scene with Keisuke and corrects a few things.

• Finishing the jogging scene with Keisuke. This is one of 3 (technically 4) exercise scenes with Keisuke. Each exercise has an option to decide Zach's attitude towards it (either "Eager," "Reluctant," or "Lethargic"); the average mood influences Keisuke's opinion of Zach and potentially Zach's stamina for sex and a slightly smaller chest size down the road (I'll have to look more into the complexity of each, but the idea is that being enthusiastic about exercise makes Zach last longer in bed and burns some of his fat away).
• There's a new succinct code system for C.H.E.A.T.S. variants within text line that should hopefully streamline some of the writing for that.
• Lots of little fixes behind the scenes to Britney's content, and a few continuity corrections.
• Fixed an annoying bug on Android that made Dance Uprising in the Britney arcade date unresponsive.

On the 11th, we had the first "Which route is the next release focusing on?" poll in a while.

Britney won both the weighted and raw tally, so we'll be returning to her story for 0.10.5 in 2 weeks (Friday, May 27, 2022).

From the poll options, the plans for her update:

Britney's writing, if chosen, will focus on the aftermath of their arcade date and getting lunch at a Texas barbecue restaurant. There will be a frank discussion about what else Zach is doing to help Britney besides posing as her boyfriend; specifically, Britney will go into detail about the drama within the university's drama department and how Zach helping with the set of their undecided play will ease tensions between the theater crew so that they can put more time into planning the production for the fall semester.

There won't be the exact choice for the play that semester in this update, but Britney will get the brilliant idea to do a food fundraiser at the local Catholic church to raise money for the underfunded department so they can go all-in with whatever they decide to perform.

Britney, of course, is planning on using this fundraiser to show off her new "boyfriend" to church people (who are in contact with her family), but if Britney can convince the food fundraiser items to be Texas barbecue in the process, she won't have any complaints...

Britney, as you might have guessed, is not just a hungry lesbian, but a bit of a carnivore.

Keisuke's planned writing is getting pushed back to 0.10.6, but it was:

Keisuke's writing, if chosen, will focus on the gym scene with Zach and Keisuke after their attempt at exercising with jogging goes south due to Zach's massive boobs making running very exhausting (not to mention sweaty). Their new solution is a low-impact workout on the exercise bikes at the university's state-of-the-art sports complex that Keisuke's status as a student athlete gives him 24/7 access to.

Once inside, things are going smoothly enough, but a girl as gorgeous as Zoey is quickly going to draw attention to herself. Either Zach or Keisuke will be the one to notice the male gazes; if Zach does, he'll get uncomfortable and ask to go to another place in the complex to do a different activity, but if Keisuke notices, he'll cause a scene by being weirdly protective, which also unnerves Zach.

Their exercise after this won't be the touted indoor poll swimming scene I want to do, but instead low-intensity weightlifting that will cause awkward tension when Keisuke insists that he spot for Zach.

Like many things in the Keisuke route, it'll be up for interpretation whether or not Keisuke is taking advantage of Zach's feminine body or if he's just being a good, supportive best friend.

Hopefully, Zoey's new outfits from Myumi will be finished by then, which means I can make good on a (somewhat) surprise promise: making Zoey's sprites compatible with Student Transfer scenarios.

If you don't know, I used to be a developer for this gender bender (but really, more body swap than anything else) community-made visual novel before I started making re:Dreamer. One of its coolest features is a simplified Ren'Py environment for aspiring authors to make their own scenarios with the game's assets or their own. Zoey's sprites would actually be a rather stark anomaly from the rest of the scenario sprites offerings as its the only one that has any full legal status to be distributed. Student Transfer and its pastiche collection of scenarios largely "borrow" assets wholesale from preexisting visual novels, although many dedicated community members edit existing assets to escape the confines of having to use what you can find from e-hentai galleries or ripping assets yourself.

It's not quite fair to compare Student Transfer to re:Dreamer for several reasons:

• Student Transfer will never finish by intentional design, while re:Dreamer has a clear and realistic ending goal.
• Relatedly, Student Transfer is sprawling with its content and has a large number of stubs, while re:Dreamer is a far more linear narrative (with lots of variations because of the C.H.E.A.T.S. system).
• Student Transfer deals primarily with lots of body swaps, while there is a singular gender bender transformation in re:Dreamer and almost certainly won't be another besides the possibility of Zach turning back into a man.
• Student Transfer takes place in a high-school setting with a very large cast of either MILFS or "they're 18 on paper" characters, while re:Dreamer focuses on a college setting with a deliberately small character count where everyone is unambiguously a young adult or older.
• Student Transfer sometimes makes sex feel secondary to the narrative to the point that its shied away from despite having access to every visual novel ever made, while re:Dreamer doesn't have enough artists to commission the nearly-endless horny wants of myself and Espeon and has a sex game as the core plot point.
• Student Transfer has a team of rotating writers with diverse writing styles and interests, while re:Dreamer is essentially worked on in its entirety by a single artist (base art notwithstanding).
• Relatedly, Student Transfer having a team of staff means that they check each others work, while re:Dreamer has lots of goofy spelling mistakes and errors that I don't notice until someone tells me to fix them.
• Student Transfer (to my knowledge) doesn't function as a sledgehammer for eggs, while re:Dreamer has an egg-cracking track record in the dozens.
• (Somehow) relatedly, Student Transfer's protagonist is by design a milquetoast and bland guy who easily functions as a self-insert, while re:Dreamer's protagonist is by design the exact opposite of that, an excessively detailed character who people have called my self-insert.

Most importantly to the point before I started to ramble though:

• Student Transfer is not a commercial game, while re:Dreamer is.

Getting the full complex nightmare of the Zoey sprites working with Student Transfer's comparatively rigid system is probably an unworkable goal (there's no way I'm going to be able to distribute the theoretical upper limit of Zoey's 9,828,000 facial expressions, color variants notwithstanding), but the 35 base expressions + a few extra customs ones I use often and her base outfits is very doable.

Anyways, I've rambled long enough, and this will be the subject of a coming Friday Update anyways, so until next time!