Academy Part 4

From dsp3000…

I’ve made some progress on part four of the Academy series since the last blog update but, due to other commitments, not as much as I would have liked. Progress is progress and, while I still have plenty to do, the game is getting there and it’s looking good.

I’m not going to commit to a release date yet but I promise that I’m definitely not slacking off. I know how eagerly anticipated my games have become so the last thing I want to do is keep anyone waiting longer than they have to.

About four or five years ago, inspired mostly by Chaotic’s games and characters, I started experimenting by modifying existing Virtual Date games, altering dialogue, changing coding and adding in other options. This developed further when I started playing around with creating my own characters and scenarios.

It’s been about two and a half years since I was able to release my first game “Tara : The Hitchhiker” back in late 2014. Looking back it was a bit rough and ready, but hopefully the improvements with each successive game I’ve made have been noticed and appreciated. I see my third game ‘Tara : The Assignment’ as my first ‘proper’ game. It’s far from perfect but a big step up in terms of image quality and content.

Looking back at earlier games I certainly see the flaws more than anything, but I am very critical of my own work. I know the some of you are too, which is cool. Constructive criticism and feedback are essential for developing ideas and for making improvements.

When I first drafted out a plot for the Academy series, it wasn’t supposed to such a big game. I had anticipated around 700 images per episode. The first three parts have had 997, 1500 and 1797 images respectively so part four will likely have even more. As the story unfolds ​I just can’t resist adding in more and more content. But size isn’t everything so I also strive to keep improving the quality of my work too.

It is after all really good to have such a creative outlet and a relatively large and receptive audience. Sometimes I wish producing these games didn’t take so long though. I get ideas much faster than I can turn them into anything.

I would also like to publicly thank Chaotic for allowing me the opportunity to showcase my work. It is much appreciated.

So, back to the update. I’m not sure what the exact image count is at the moment because I’m writing this update on another computer, but I have completed a few more scenes since this time last week. Here are a few more images to tease you all.

Next time I might say a little more about the new characters who you will meet in ‘The Academy : Part Four’. I don’t want to give too much away though so we’ll see…

dsp3000

Photographer part 2

Just one quick update from me too – Photographer part 2 now has an official walkthrough. You can find it here : http://www.vdategames.com/walkthroughs/photographer2.html

This week, the first update from dsp3000 on his upcoming game,  Academy Part 4.

After a short break after completing part three, production on part four of my ‘Academy’ series started around mid January. This is proving to be the most complex part of the story so far due to the carry over effects from previous installments.

The codes required to play the Academy series are a way of recording information and passing it on to the next part. So what you did in one part has an effect on what you could do in the next, and so on. Be aware that you will definitely need to write down your codes from the end of part three if you want to get anywhere in part four.

The number of variables from part three means there will be several different outcomes and options available in part four. As you can probably imagine, working out all these variables is fairly complicated and time consuming, but I’m getting there.

Today the image count stands at just over 1100, and I’m just over halfway through my production schedule.

The last four weeks of production are usually the most intensive for me while I push towards completion. So with that in mind I am optimistically hoping to complete everything by the beginning of May. I wouldn’t be surprised if I run over a little, especially if I can’t keep resisting the temptation to add little extras into the planned scenes as I work on them.

For this week here are a few sample images from ‘The Academy : Part Four’.

April 1st

So, the first thing I want to address today is the date.

I did debate doing something in the April fools day spirit, but I ultimately decided against it. Plenty of the visitors to this site are international, and I don’t know how universal April fools is. People might just get confused.

Which is a shame. I did have an entire fake announcement worked out. I was going to quit releasing two large games per year, and instead follow the common Patreon creators model of only one game at all, but released dripfeed by tiny expansions every month, even though they were the most basic images possible and clearly only took me about 1 day to make. I was then going to milk anything I made for as long as possible, continuing far beyond the plot’s natural end until everyone was thoroughly sick of it, my revenue began to slowly drop, and I would begrudgingly move onto to something else.

Satire!

But. no. I don’t think everyone would have gotten the joke and I would have been more likely to confuse rather than amuse.

Leanna

Slow and steady means she will eventually be finished.

Here’s a new preview of the third possible ‘fitness’ choice, the gym (the other two being yoga and basketball).

I’m getting a bit tired of just rendering the buildup, so when I finish all of the gym images, I think I’m going to cut to the end and start rendering some of the sex segments. Really need to start playing with a naked Leanna. 🙂

Academy Part 4

Dsp3000 is still working diligently on the next in his series. We may have a full blog post from him next week, but if we don’t, understand that it’s only because he’s working hard on content instead.

Girl group game

A little while ago, I floated the idea of a ‘girl group’ based game where you could romance several members of an all female singing group.

When Leanna’s done, I’ll probably want to do something in Poser next. Crystal Part 3 is the obvious choice, but I’ve used up about half the ideas for her game in Leanna, so I’m probably going to need to do something else while I come up with enough scenes I like.

I have a few basic characters worked out. I really want to finally use Mia in this. I think she’ll fit well.

Beyond that, I have another character I’ve been working on. She could be the second member.

For a third member, I like the idea of a little variety in the body shapes. Someone quite small, skinny, probably with smaller breasts.

Still just gathering ideas at the moment though. Given the setting, it seems easier to write scenes than it does for Crystal part 3 though.

Poll

No poll just yet. I may add one if something occurs to me.

Just a fairly simple update this week as there’s nothing too new or dramatic to report.

Leanna

Production on Leanna is progressing. There’s been a little less done this week due to work and social commitments, but I still got a nice pile of images rendered.

For your second date with Leanna, you’ll have a choice of three locations. One of them is the mall and here’s the first image from it.

Also here’s an image of the final version of the female player character, but with a darker skin tone.

Other games

Nothing to report from either dsp3000 or MrStomper. When I know something you will.

Poll

So, for the poll this week, I want to ask something about your gameplay style out of curiosity.

When playing the game, do you play as yourself, or perhaps a more of stylized version of yourself?

Or do you play as a character you’ve invented?

Or do you not care as long as the gender and skin tone match what you are in real life?

I know that some people also play through multiple times as different characters, but for this poll I’m asking what you do the first time you play, or perhaps the persona you adopt most of the times you play. Whatever you consider the main character you choose to play as.

Before I address my work progress, I want to take some time today to talk about something that seems to appear every so often in the comments section and in my emails ; fetishes.

Fetishes

Although it’s not the main content of most comments or the emails I receive, it’s fairly predictable that throughout the year I will always receive a fairly steady amount of requests from people to include their fetish in one of my upcoming games.

So, I decided to make this handy little list of every fetish I can think of and classify them in accordance to how likely it is that they’ll ever appear.

Green category – Likely to appear

These are the fetishes that I personally like and have a 100% chance of appearing in my games.

• Public exhibitionism
• Outdoor sex
• Dirty talk
• Lesbianism
• Facials
• Voyeurism
• Masturbation

Yellow category – Maybes

These are the ones that I’m not really into except occasionally if I’m in a certain mood, but am willing to include if there’s a sufficient level of interest in them. If I have a poll and about 75% or more vote in favor of it, then I’ll have it in my game.

• Anal
• Girl on girl incest
• A boy+boy+girl scene (or any scene featuring multiple men and one woman)
• Light S&M or bondage
• Monster sex
• Feet (really not into this myself, but nothing against it)
• Creampies
• Squirting

Red category – Will never include

These are the ones I’ll be including when hell freezes over. Maybe if you offered be $100K to include one I’d think about some of them, but until then you’ll never see these in my games.

• Rape
• Blackmail
• Boy on girl incest
• Futa/shemale/’chicks with dicks’
• Peeing
• Pooping
• Breast milk stuff
• Underage
• Necrophilia
• Period play
• Heavy/hard S&M
• Cheating/infidelity
• Bestiality

If there’s one I missed and you’re curious about, feel free to ask below and I’ll and them to one of the three lists.

Leanna

Work on Leanna is still progressing at a steady pace. I’m still optimistically looking at a release date in May.

As an alternative to the yoga class, you can a choose playing basketball with Leanna’s ‘friends’ instead. Here’s a couple of previews from the sequence.

Girls section

Something I forgot to mention last week!

When I released Photographer Part 2 for free, I also updated the girls section. It now includes every lady from my newer games, and everyone from dsp3000’s games.

http://www.vdategames.com/girls.html

Poll

Is there any interest in slightly more ‘toon’ characters. That is, women with a slightly more stylized look to them. This isn’t my own creation, but it’s a good example of something I could create.

The character wouldn’t necessarily look like that though. Alternatively, I could get something looking more like Elizabeth Comstock from Bioshock.

What do you say? It might be fun to experiment with character designs a little after Leanna is finished, but I can understand why some people might find them off putting.

 

Photographer Part 2

The Photographer – Part 2 has now been released for free.

You can find it here for online play or download : http://www.vdategames.com/phot2.html

 

Sadly, Kexter wasn’t able to find the time to convert the game to a new engine (he’s a busy guy), so I went about doing the conversions I felt were necessary myself. This was mainly just how the animations work. I converted all 140 or so GIFs to image sequences instead. Everything works and flows much better now. If you already have a copy of this game from the members section, I encourage you to a get a copy of this version too as the animations work a thousand times better.

The final game is now over 10000 images in size and about 3GB to download. This mean I’ve been having some trouble finding flehosts as most don’t permit files that big, or if they do, you have to pay for the privilege of downloading them. So, since the site has been good so far, I’ve actually added the downloadable file as a direct from this site. Hopefully, that will work well. If you can’t see the new download link, remember to refresh the game’s page.

Other games

Progress with Leanna is still going fairly well. This week, I’ve begun rendering images for you second ‘date’ together. I’ll be sharing some of them next week.

Nothing to report from either dsp3000 or MrStomper. When there’s something to say, don’t worry, I’ll say it.

Poll

Now that Photographer Part 2 is released, who’s your favorite lady from it? Pick up to three.

EDIT : having a few last minute difficulties with photographer part 2. Hopefully it should be online before the end of the day.

Welcome to March, everyone.

Photographer Part 2

Photographer Part 2 is still due to be released for free next Friday, March 10th. The main reason why I want to leave the release day until then (rather than just releasing it today), is that hopefully Kexter will be upgrading the engine so it runs smoother. He may not have time though – he’s a busy guy. We”l see what happens. Either way, in one form or another, it will be available for everyone next week.

Leanna

Despite her getting de-prioritized, I have been working still on Leanna : Fading the Facade. This week, I’ve mainly been creating renders for a scene when the two of you are due to meet in the morning, but Leanna failed to set her alarm and slept in. As a result, she’s dressed more casually, and her hair is very unkempt.

As I stated last week, I am also going to be going back though the game and adding images for ethnicity options. That is, the images that show if the player wants their character to be black.

Here’s the new female player character with darker skin.

I’m still not 100% satisfied with her though. Her skin still looks a bit too matted and there’s something a little off about the color tone.

And here’s the options for the Male player characters. As decided/announced in previous blog posts, you will have the option of seeing certain moments (such as sex) from a third person angle, not just first person POV. In these, you will be able to see the female players characters face, but the males’s will always just be out of shot or obscured.

For this game, I’ve also decided to give the male player slightly more size in their genitals. I don’t want them too big or ‘cartoon-y’, but a bit more substantial length and girth should make the sex scenes a little hotter.

Poll

This week the poll’s all about tattoos. Do you like them on virtual women, or do they spoil what would otherwise be a perfect natural sight?

So, sadly a bit of bad news today. It looks like the release of Leanna is going to get pushed back by a fairly significant amount. Now that I’ve been rendering IRAY images in larger groups for while, I’m seeing all of the problems as they are, from a tech view, and then from an artistic one.

The tech view

Firstly, batch rending things overnight is good, but it isn’t as great as I thought it would be. Using the graphics cards for so long wears it down a little so that the next image takes longer. So, say you have 20 images which will take 30 minutes each to render. The first 8 will take about 30 mins, but then they will start to take 40, then 50. By the time you get to image 15, they are taking about 2 hours each to render. The issue is solved by simply restarting the computer, but it’s not really an option at 3am.

About a third of the time, there’s also normally another issue. Maybe the scene is too dark, maybe there’s weird reflection from a character’s eyes that makes them look possessed. Maybe, as occurred earlier this week for an entire set of ten I rendered overnight, Kristen will be super shiny for some reason and I’ll have to re-render the entire set, but first of all do about 7 test renders to find what the problem was.

So, I was generalizing and optimistically saying that I could render 150 images per week – and that would be true if everything worked flawlessly the first time. But it doesn’t. This week I’ve only been able to add about 30 new images to the game. There may be some weeks when I’m on a roll and get 100 images plus rendered, but I think they’re going to be the rare ones.

I’m rendering what I can during the daytime, but the another problem with that is it’s interfering with my work a little. I have a ‘main’ job away from this site and I do a lot of it from home. Some of the softwares I use for the job require a graphics card, so I can’t really render anything using IRAY while I’m doing that.

The artistic view

Some things have been starting to bug me about Leanna from an artistic view too. As it is, the game is more linear than I’d like.

The game structure of Betsy goes something like this :

• Linear day 1
• Choice of 3 dates
• Linear day 2
• Choice of 3 dates
• Linear day 3
• Choice of 3 photoshoot locations
• Linear series of ending sequences (though with different scenes and consequences depending on earlier choices)

Leanna by comparison, goes like this :

• Linear day 1
• Choice of 2 activities
• Linear day 2
• Linear day 3
• Linear day 4
• Linear day 5
• Choice of 2 activities
• Linear day 6
• End sequences

As you can see, there’s much less choice in this game, and it’s been really starting to bug me. I made things a little more linear in order to reduce the amount of work, but I don’t know if it’s worth it. As much as I could at the time, I’ve always tried to make these games have the most amount of choice possible.

So, what I intend to do is expand the game, even if it means more work. I want to do this game right more than I want to do it quickly. So, that’s what I’m going to do!

I need at least one more day in there with three choices. I also need to expand the times you have a choice of 2 activities and make it three.

I am also going to include the choice of selecting ethnicity! I know according to the stats that only (I think) 25% of people play as black characters, but that’s still a pretty significant amount. Having that option has been a hallmark of my games ever since Maddison too. It’s only right that it’s there.

So, what is happening?

I’ve been pushing to finish this one as soon as possible, but my normal schedule is to release two big game per year – one around January/February, and one around July/August. Maybe that should have been the reasonably expectation this whole time.

I’m going to continue working on Leanna as much as I can, but I don’t expect it to be finished until late May. It may even be longer, so be prepared! It is possible the game may not see a release until October (ish). If it looks like game production will take that long, I will probably start another game with the intention of a summer release. Most likely Crystal Part 3, but another possibility is the Girl Group game I was floating the idea of last week. Either way, it’ll be rendered with Poser, but IRAY.

To make up for the delay a little though, here a picture of Leanna doing her best Marilyn Monroe impression.

Free game

So, that means it’s time to release a free game! Since it’s been a while, it needs to be a big one too. I was going to have a poll to decide which one, but let’s face it ; it’s going to be Photographer Part 2. So, that’s what I’m doing.

Photographer Part 2 will be released for free two weeks today, March 10th.

Members game

It hasn’t been too long since there was a members game, plus it shouldn’t be too long until Academy Part 4 is there, but I still kinda want to do something small for the members section.

The short story I did for the advent calendar was quite popular. It was also easy to do for me. Since I already had all of the characters and the scene of Betsy’s bedroom setup, It only took me 2 days to complete.

I think maybe a pack of short stories similar to that might be a good way to go. Call it ‘VDate stories’, and have it be 5 or so images series of a little episodes in various characters lives.

I’m not sure though. I’ll think about it.

 

Leanna

Pretty much just more of the same to report this week. Progress is continuing, images are being rendered and content is being written.

I did some math yesterday, and it’s possible Leanna will be finished in about a months’s time. It also looks like the game might have slightly less images than, say, Betsy. I think this game will have around a thousand when I’m done (unlike Betsy’s massive 1600 ish), but I won’t know for certain until later in development.

One thing I’d like to draw attention to is the title, which some of you many have seen in the coming soon section. The full title will be ‘Leanna : Fading the Facade’.  I think I’m going to start formatting all titles like this – the name, a colon, then a subtitle. Standardizing it like that will mean people know which series and creator it comes from, as opposed to just having it be a name, which is kind of vague.

A casual conversation with Leanna in her dressing room.

Two images from the yoga class you can share together.

Random extra

Earlier this week I had an idea for a game I quite liked and would like to share with you.

How about a game where you are helping a ‘girl group’, that is a group of female singers? A sort of Pseudo Spice Girls. There could be five of them each with their own personalities and looks. I could make sure there’s at least one blond, one brunette and one redhead. I could have a variety of body shapes, some skinny, some more voluptuous. I could even have some variety in breast size, from large to very small.

It’s not a full premise yet, but I like the idea of a game where it’s centered around a group of women rather than just one. A bit like pool party, but with 5 brand new characters instead.

Let me know what you think below.

Poll

How do you like the sound of game idea above?

Leanna

Progress on Leanna, the upcoming new and free game, is still going steady. There’s actually not too much to report on the game beyond that. Hopefully, we’ll see a release date sometime in March, but it’s still not something I want to commit to yet.

Leanna takes the player to a roller disco to prove how totally fun she is. It doesn’t go well.

The player relaxes at home for a minute from the optional third person camera angle. Both male and female variants are shown. Note how the Male PC’s face is obscured.

This week I’ve also decided to remove one of the 13 sequences from the game. The hiking chapter wasn’t really adding anything to the plot that couldn’t be done elsewhere, so I’ve just decided to cut it and probably use it in Crystal Part 3 instead.

The Academy

For those worried from my comments last week that dsp3000 had disappeared, don’t worry too much. We’ve been in contact, all is well, and he is diligently working on Academy Part 4. There is not a scheduled release just yet, but it’s assumed he’ll be releasing it either April or May.

Polls

Thank you to everyone who voted in the poll last week. I’ve finally decided on a setup which serves a similar purpose to photoshoots, but also works very differently. It’s basically a sort of striptease, role playing scenario with the occasional photo. I won’t give away all of the details, but maybe this test render will give you a few clues.

For the poll this week, a bit of a random question. Do you have a preference on what the woman should be wearing during sex? Heels during sex are pretty common (either in my games or porn), but do you prefer barefoot? Does it even matter to you? Let’s find out.