Friday Update #15: Dialing It In

EDIT (seconds after I published this initially): FUCK I forgot to include this absolutely gushing review Natalie over at Nigma Box wrote for re:Dreamer 0.8.1. Give it a read, then give the rest of her blog a read. She's built up a respectable review website and blog worth checking out, especially in the niche of reviews for gender bender visual novels, most notably Student Transfer and its various scenarios. She also liked Katamari Damacy REROLL, so you know she has good taste you can trust.

What's good, folks? This development cycle's Friday Update covers something that's been integral to the story of re:Dreamer but largely left up to the reader's imagination until recently.

Meet Zach's customized Honeycrisp 7.

This phone was introduced by itself in the 0.8.0 release which becomes public next Friday on June 11, but it's been making frequent cameos as Ai's background.

This heavily-modified-from-stock smartphone has an iPhone 4's size, an iPhone 7's buttons and bevels, and an iPhone 12's camera and rear plate (it's distinctly a 3:2 aspect ratio screen because it'd look awful if it were a modern ultrawide aspect ratio with how it's placed inside the window of the visual novel it appears in).

Wannabee cyberpunk hacker chuuni that Zach is, he's taken a locked device from a company notorious for its hostility towards right to repair and unauthorized modifications and turned it into something that is uniquely his.

Setting a higher Aloofness on the C.H.E.A.T.S. stats changes 0.8.0's reworked intro to go into more detail about his modifications, but here's a partial list with even more details:

• The stock chip has been replaced with a significantly more powerful one designed for integrated professional mobile video editing workstations. A specialized chip like this is normally something an individual consumer can't get, but via undocumented "third shift" manufacturing at plants, a few have wound up on the gray market.
• For reasons I will get into in the next point, Zach replaced the stock aluminum case with a thinner custom-made tungsten carbide one. Tungsten carbide alloy (WC) is about 8 times stiffer than aluminum (Al) (Young's modulus: WC 450-650 GPa, Al 70 GPa), over 3 times stronger before breaking (ultimate tensile strength: WC 344 MPa, Al 110 MPa), orders of magnitude harder (WC 9 Mohs, Al 2.75 Mohs), half as thermally conductive (WC 110 W/(m·K), Al 237 W/(m⋅K)), and over 5 times as dense (WC 15.63 g/cm^3, Al 2.70 g/cm^3). If you'll allow me to flex my knowledge from a few semesters of mechanical engineering before I changed my major, all of this means that you can make a significantly thinner piece of metal with the same strength that weighs the same, dissipates heat more slowly, and is virtually impossible to scratch. This scratch-resistance second only to diamond is both the reason this alloy is popular for jewelry and why Zach opts to not use a case on his phone, despite it looking like he should care to get one.
• Running such a powerful chip requires a lot of electricity that generates a lot of heat. Zach had partly solved the issue for his hands by making a thinner case that doesn't heat up as quickly, but in a passive cooling device like a phone, a lack of thermal dissipation around sensitive components can be fatal to the circuitry. Zach took advantage of his roomier case to install a copper vapor chamber heat spreader to dissipate this heat, but as his case now has a pipe running through it, he's have to split the battery into two parts. He's crammed most of the remaining space with two high-capacity batteries that he has to replace every year or so because their higher performance degrades them more quickly.
• Having a bit of room left over in his build but not wanting to waste the space, Zach replaced the single stock rear camera with an ultrawide one and a telephoto one.
• The operating system is a custom fork of Sunfish OS (an analog to the real-life open source project Sailfish OS).

After all the work Zach has put into customizing it, his phone is by far his most prized possession, which is why he's understandably so annoyed at Ai for taking it over and making it her home.

(Funnily enough, the device is refereed to as <code>aiphone</code> in the game's character code, a pun that I swear wasn't intentional but which I realized I had made seconds after the first time I had typed it. To explain, I was trying to get around the since-removed Student Transfer code that prevented duplicate character names; <code>ai</code> was already separately defined as a speaker in the game script and removing that definition would have removed her custom font, so her character sprite was renamed something different. Yes, this ends up making Ai's name a three-level pun for the first-person pronoun I, A.I., and iPhone.)

This is the phone as it appears after its debut in 0.8.0. If you'll note the cellular reception bars, the WiFi connectivity, the time, and the battery charge at the top of the screen, those actually going to be a changing as the story progresses. The time will advance and the charge on the battery will decrease as Zach goes throughout the story, and the reception, connectivity, and carrier name will change based on Zach being in different areas (for instance, Zach's dorm will have lower connectivity because of the shitty WiFi router on his floor, but the connectivity in Keisuke's dorm or Rich's apartment will be full-strength).

Honestly, I wanted to make the phone screen look gaudy and tasteless with the bleeding hacker edge of a bad Rainmeter skin or the Deus Ex: Human Revolution menu screens to reflect Zach's terminally chuuni taste in tech aesthetics, but I accidentally made it look nice.

Somewhere along the way of making the re:Dreamer GUI look good I forgot how to make an intentionally bad one. I envy my high school self right now.

Anyways, let's talk about the home screen and each icon on it, because there's some neat environmental storytelling going on here.

As seen in-game after re:Dreamer is installed, we have:

• Phone: Zach has no messages. He doesn't get many calls.
• Messages: Also with no new messages. He gets less texts than he gets calls.
• re:Dreamer: The app's very simplistic icon stands out even from the flat designs of the others. The flat black background is almost menacing, and the two letters are a orange, a color that doesn't show up anywhere else on the screen. It takes the place of Zach's favorite gacha, symbolizing how once re:Dreamer enters his life, Zach's playtime is over.
• Lockbox Pro: A security and privacy app. Zach is broke, so using a paid service speaks volumes to the price he puts on his privacy (as a note, Ai can just waltz past the encrypted contents of the app).
• Contacts: A sparsely populated list. Zach has memorized most of the numbers in here anyways, but it's here on the home screen anyways. Maybe he was hoping college would give him a chance to add people to it?
• Mail: As if Zach trusts email. Still, he has to use it for school, so it's on the home screen.
• LCU Anchor: The app for Zach's school (Lewis & Clark University). It features campus street and building maps, a course curriculum portal, emergency campus services contact information, and perhaps most importantly, a QR code you open on the screen to get in and out of locked campus buildings like dorms or dining halls.
• IchiYen OLB: To paraphrase Chris Rock, "If you see this, you know a person's credit is fucked up!" The strings attached to Zach's sizable student loan and his personal financial irresponsibility means he is forced to use his country's national bank service instead of a better private financial institution for a personal checking account. Think of it as combining the worst of a downright evil bank like Bank of America with the shoestring functionality of an online government service like the IRS.
• Vigor: Zach is too much of a power user to settle for a simple Notes app. The name is a pun on Vim, the ubiquitous text editor.
• Foxrun P: An analog to Wolfram Alpha (I wanted to call it Foxrun Prime but I only have so many characters to work with for each name). It's functionally the same thing as the pun's namesake and is a well-regarded lifeline for struggling mechanical engineering students *cough cough*. Zach doesn't use its functions as often as you would expect a student of his major to, but it can shorten the time it takes for him to do coursework, which is why it's on his phone's home screen.
• Live Trans: An unintentional pun on the theme of the game (or is it an order haha?), this is an interpreter software. Zach lives in what is technically an officially bilingually English and Japanese territory, but until he took his reckless sabbatical, he's never needed to know anything but English; however, without something like the U.N. or the other aftereffects of America's Allied victory in World War II in this fictional timeline, he ran into severe issues internationally with people not knowing what he was saying. The app functions largely as you would expect any decent interpreter software to do and was Zach's lifeline abroad. A particularly bad experience in France with rude locals has instilled him with a strong reluctance to remove it, even though he's back home and it's highly improbable that he'd need to understand another language.
• Maps: Zach is in a new environment and doesn't trust his the campus maps on his school's app very much. This map pulls data from real-time instead of the one time a bored intern digitized a campus map from a decade ago.
• Clock: Zach has to wake up just like everyone else.
• Calendar: Zach doesn't have enough going on in his life to really need a planner to help his memory, but a calendar is helpful for reminders of school assignments.
• Photos: You have no idea how much porn is on Zach's phone.
• Camera: Despite Zach's camera upgrades, this app was sparsely used except for taking photos of blackboards at school; now that he's a girl with a body worth photographing, things are going to change.
• Music: Zach would walk around with headphones everywhere if he could get away with it. He's not exactly a fan of music, but he needs something to decorate the time in his life or else his runaway thoughts will run wild and take him for the ride. You might have noticed, but characters in this game have certain genres linked them: Keisuke is grungy rock (think instrumental rather than vocal), Britney is high-energy electronic hip-hop (think the Jet Set Radio/Jet Set Radio Future soundtracks), Rich is planned for classical, Zach's mom is acid jazz, Ryouichi is a similar hard rock to Keisuke's rock, Ai is funky electronica, and Zach is mellow hip-hop instrumentals (think Clams Casino).
• Deep Ocean: I wanted to call this Deep Sea Diver after the Arthur episode, but alas character limits are a thing. It's an encrypted web browser with Tor-like capabilities. Zach uses it to browse porn without fear of being tracked.
• HackBelt: Zach's hacking kit full of stuff that his phone manufacturer would prefer not exist. Ai thinks it's cute.
• Settings: Zach is a tinkerer by nature and he can't bear the thought of not being able to adjust his phone whenever he sees the need.

I have made app icons for other apps that will appear, such as Stratus, Share (the social media app Britney will force Zach to sign up for to make their relationship seem more convincing), a women's health tracker (fun menstrual cycles!), a general fitness app (Keisuke is going to force Zach to exercise), a weather app (for when Zach starts actually caring about being outdoors), a cooking app (Rich is going to demand that Zoey learn to cook him meals if she wants his help), and a plethora of anime girl app icons for Zach's several dozen gacha (which will likely end up being made with AI CharacterMaker).

One thing in particular to note is the wallpaper on Zach's phone. Zach is paranoid of people invading the personal temple of his phone, but he's also a degenerate. It's a sexy race queen outfit for one of Zach's favorite anime girls from a gacha he plays that just totally 100% coincidentally looks a whole lot like Zoey who is the epitome of what Zach finds attractive in a woman (but don't look into it haha). This is meant to visualize blending Zach's love of fast race cars and attractive anime women into one image, but note how the re:Dreamer app icon is partially hiding the face of the anime girl who looks a whole lot like Zoey who is the epitome of what Zach finds attractive in a woman and what he ended up turning into via the app that is obscuring her face, but like before this is totally 100% coincidentally and not meant to be a visual metaphor about how re:Dreamer is both simultaneously the pathway to being that woman and the obstruction from being that woman.

Nope, no clever subtext going on here! 

The wallpaper that we have right now by LU isn't exactly something we have the rights to use, but it's a placeholder. 

The real wallpaper that will replace it has been commissioned from PSI (he/him) over on Twitter (and yes, he's taking commissions right now, but only SFW ones).

Here's a sketch of the totally-not-AL-Taihou wearing the totally-not-Fate-Nero's semi-official race queen outfit that I showed in the last Friday Update. 

When it's ready, the wallpaper in its completed form will be offered to patrons of all tiers as a download for them to use as their own phone wallpaper. I'm not saying it'll turn you into an anime girl if you use it for your phone, but I'm also not not saying that.

Before I sign off for this Friday (I somehow released this on an actual Friday), I'll leave you with the most recent update to the Zach to Zoey transformation HCGs we've commissioned from TiltSHIFT. These are still in the cleaned drafts stage, but this is now the cleanest and most complete look we've had at Zach before the boy got removed from him (note that the phone he is holding is the shorter model Zach has; I was insistent that TiltSHIFT work from the reference of the first image in this Friday Update).

0.8.2 drops on Friday, June 11th with more Britney content. The expanded Zoey expressions means that it's now possible to convincingly show a sex scene with only the sprites. The plan is for our cosplay nut lesbian love interest to measure this new girl so that she can modify an old bra to fit her larger chest, and let's just say it's going to become a very handsy scene.

Until next time!