April 29th Update

Progress on Betsy is going well. Since I was already working on it while this blog was mainly talking about dsp3000’s last game, there are already hundreds of images finished. While I’m certainly not going to commit to a release date yet, here is a good chance it could be released by the end of May.

Besides Betsy in this game, there are two more notable female characters. The first is Betsy’s best friend, Violet. A big trouble maker at the school, she is mainly seen as a misbehaving rebel by everyone else. You may also consider her the ‘wilder’ character in this.

violetoutfits1

Initially, I wasn’t convinced that the least well behaved girl in the school would be best friends with the most well behaved, but now I really like it. Neither role is likely to make you too popular, so I like the idea of the two social outcasts joining forces when nobody else would really accept them.

The second character is April. I won’t spoil this character too much, but I will say that she starts off as more of a ‘bully’ character, but can be redeemed along the way.

aprilnew1

As you may have noticed by the above images, the characters all go through a number of outfit changes in this game. Since everything is not set on a single night this time, I felt it made sense. Each of the three main characters have at least 4 costume changes. Here are Betsy’s three main outfits.

promo7

 

Next, something important I forgot to mention last week. I spent a long day going through the basic functions of the game engine and reading about the latest html possibilities. The result is that I’ve added a few upgrades and altered the layout. I’m now using ‘local variables’ rather than cookies. These can be more reliable, but more importantly, they should work online and offline with all browsers. So, you will be able to download and play Betsy offline using Chrome.

I’ve also decided to loose the bars on the left side of the screen. Previously, they only showed things to the nearest five, so they weren’t really that useful anyway, only serving as a very vague rating. For Betsy, I’m just going to use numbers. It should look something like this :

screenshot

Another quick thing I forgot to mention last week. When deleting all of the adverts, I also updated any dead links on the site. All free games should now have three active filehosts for you to download them from.

Finally, a quick word about Patreon. Some of you were mentioning it as an option last week among the comments. It is certainly a possibility, but probably not the direction the site will be going in soon. I have been keeping an eye on, say, Tlaero and Mortzes patreon (https://www.patreon.com/tora), but while I’m not going to disclose exactly how much revenue the members section generates, it certainly looks like more than Patreon would provide. Needless to say, I make a sufficient amount from it that I can now produce the occasional game completely for free.

Next week, I will start talking about the content of the game, including the main plot.

April 22nd Update

Hello Everyone

Today, I am very happy to announce that the next game for the site will be Betsy. You may remember a couple of months ago, I had started work on Crystal Part 3, but my conviction towards it was waning. I think it might have been the format. The game followed the Jennifer template of picking many different activities and having more unlock unlock by making the right choices, but was just a bit too similar too that game. The plan is to have a large rethink about it, then maybe end up releasing it around Christmas.

This is mainly a blog post about Betsy though, so let’s move onto her.

promo3

Rachel’s slightly younger sister, Betsy is the shyer, nerdier member of the family. She loves studying, learning, and aspires to be an actress one day. In game, you will play as Betsy’s boyfriend/girlfriend (you will have the choice of both gender and ethnicity). Both of you are in your final year at school (though I am careful to note that you are both 18).

For the format of this game, I wanted to try something a little different. For these types of game (and perhaps games in general), there always seem to be a bit of debate between player freedom and story. A more linear game means you can spend more time constructing plot and you can build the characters, but the fact that you are usually forced down a specific path can make you feel a lot less ‘involved’ in the game. Greater freedom in game however, can make it feel much more like you are there and truly controlling what’s happening, but normally at the expense of character development.

Keeping all that in mind, I wanted to try a sort of hybrid game. The whole thing is divided into several sequences, which alternate between free and linear. Instead of one big date night, the player have Betsy and smaller dates in the evening, with more linear days at school in between. It’s my hope that having the more linear sequences in between will greatly help build the characters, but the choices presented in the evening will add lots of freedom and replayability.

One more thing I want to mention, because I know some of you will be thinking about it straight away, there will be no threesome with Betsy and Rachel in this. Both Betsy and the player are supposed to be fairly inexperienced when it come to sex (when you have sex in this game it’s supposed to be the first time either of you have ever done it), so it seemed like too much of an unrealistic leap to go from first time sex to threesome with your sister. It’s likely to be in a future game.

For this game, I also spent some of my time refining my image rendering skills. I might as well be honest about why – I had been looking at some of Mortze’s and felt a little intimated by how much better they looked than some of mind, so I decided to up my game. Hopefully, you’ll be seeing a leap in image quality for this one. 🙂

bowl9

home14

home21

bowl2

Finally, the big announcement about Betsy, this game…will be free!

It’s been too long since I made a new game free straight away, so I’ve decided it will be this one. Part of that is also going to be a little economic/social experiment. Obviously, in principal, I like it when my games are free. I’m an artist, and the more people who play my games and enjoy them, the happier I get. However, I do need a standard income from the members section. So, this time around, I’m going to try releasing the game for free, with an emphasis on signing up to the members section by choice, more like a donation where you get 15 games in exchange for it. If it works, this may be the first of many new games I make for free.

In addition to that, I also just want to quickly address the adverts on the site. You may have noticed they’ve gone. They’ve been annoying me for a while and the revenue from them wasn’t that high, so I just decided to remove them. I think the site looks much nicer now. 🙂

That’s all for this week. Next Friday I’ll be posting about all the other characters you’ll be seeing in this game.

April 8th Update

The final post from dsp3000 on his game, The Academy Part 1…

I’m very happy to announce that my new game is finished and should now be in the members section.

‘The Academy: Part One’ is the first installment of what I intend to be a five part series.

This first episode is mostly about establishing the location, the characters and the storyline.

There are several tasks to complete on day one, but your main objective is not to get fired. This could be difficult considering the many ways you can be lead astray by a whole load of sexy girls.

Having played it through a few times, I can confirm that this game is much longer in duration than anything I’ve made before. Set aside at least an hour to play it.

Overall there are 997 images in the game plus another 18 end cards, and 25 profile shots.

This game should prove quite challenging. 12 of the game endings mean you get fired, but at least you can do it in style.

You can have a bit of fun during your first day in your new job and make it through to the end too though.

Have fun discovering all the endings!

EDIT – Here is the patch for those not wanting to download the whole things again : PATCH

Just drop all of it’s contents into the “game” folder, and replace the items if prompted.

promo_amy promo_annie promo_banner promo_bridgette promo_didi promo_laura promo_lola promo_megan promo_principal

April 1st Update

From dsp3000 on his upcoming game…

Good news and bad news this week. I’ll start with the bad news…

I’m going to have to miss my self imposed deadline and release date. I had hope to release the game today but it isn’t quite finished.

Despite putting in some very intensive production sessions over the past couple of weeks it’s not quite there yet.

The good news is that, barring a catastrophe, it will be released next Friday 8th April.

Depending on your perspective, the other good news is the reason for the delay.

When planning out, this first installment (of what should become a five part saga), was originally going to have between 700 and 800 images.

Having now completed 963 images, and with just a handful left to create, this game will again exceed 1000 images. Along with writing, and coding the game, I probably average about 100 images per week so this explains why it’s running late.

You may ask yourselves why I don’t just stick to the original plan…?

Well sometimes some scenes end up requiring a few more images and a few more pages to properly tell the story. Getting the first part of this series right is really important for the continuity of the project.

An extra week also means I’ll be able to thoroughly test the game and iron out any glitches.

So… this week, here are a few more teaser images from the forthcoming and so very nearly completed game.

sample8 sample9 sample10 sample11 sample12 sample13 sample14 sample15 sample16 sample17 sample18 sample19 sample20 sample21