April & Violet

Progress is going very well, and I feel like I’m nearing the end of production. At this speed, I think a release date of November 4th is very likely, but I’ll refrain from saying it’s official until I’m more certain, which will probably be next Friday.

Since I refrained from it last week, today I also have lots of pictures to share with you.

After spending the night at the motel, April discovers that her car has been drained of gas…

After discovering you are all stranded there, both April and Violet change into something better suited for the heat…

April takes charge figuring out your options, while Dylan tries to help, and Violet nurses a hangover…

Violet and the player investigate a nearby town only to find it deserted…

Finally, you find some gas….

…but it may be too good to be true, as April spots something disturbing in her mirror!

Since it is supposed to me a mystery what’s going on, I don’t want to get into too many details about what’s happening, but that should be enough to start you guessing for now.

I also have a bit of an update on the sexual content. In earlier posts, I stated that there would be one ‘solo’ sex scene for each of the three women, then one orgy at the end. Sadly, (or not) I’ve decided to change that.

There were a few aspects about it that were bugging me. I think the biggest issue though was the pacing. Since it’s only a medium sized game, having four separate sex scenes makes the sex too frequent. By comparison, Betsy is about 2.5 times the size of what this will be, and that only has three.

So, instead, I decided to demote the solo April and Violet sex scenes to just nude scenes, but on the more more positive side, this means I’ve decided to expand the epilogue sex scene with them both involved. The sex with them at the end of Betsy was a little brief, so this should more than make up for it. Doing it this way should also mean I finish it a bit quicker.

It also makes a bit more sense with them being in a relationship. I was going to have them make a rule where they’re allowed to sleep with you because of a deal they’d made, but having an epilogue scene where you all just agree to get naughty in a hotel room after the main plot makes much more sense. Also, inspired by comments on the blog, I will be having a ‘titty-fuck’ with Violet and deepthroat blowjob with April as part of that scene!

Leanna

Last week, I added a note to the blog say that, although I love Leanna’s look, I was having some trouble with her face. I don’t know what it is about her face, but it’s really, really difficult to get her smiling and not have it look weird. It’s like the rest of the face doesn’t shift with her lips properly.

You can see what I mean by these images…

So, I started working on a new face. Bit of a character change, but I’d rather do it now when I’m so early into production. This is what I’ve come up with. Everything else is the same, it’s just the face I changed….

I like it! She somehow looks a bit more like a news anchor to me. More mature, but not necessarily older. Slightly sterner face too, which fits with the ‘bitchy’ personality.

This is how her smile looks now…

Which looks much, much better to me. It’s probably still tweak it a bit over the next week, but this’ll be pretty close to what I use.

Very interested in what everyone thinks about the upgrade. Leave your thoughts below if you have any.

This weeks poll

I’ve decided I really like having polls on the blog here. It’s a good way to get feedback, and to to see how many people are reading it. So, I think I’m going to try having a poll every week, even if it’s for something frivolous.

This week, Leanna’s name. Since I’m changing her face, I’m also very tempted to change her name. I’ve been leaning towards Sienna instead. Her surname is Marseilles, and I feel “Sienna Marseilles” sounds a bit more news anchor than “Leanna Marseilles”. So, what do you think? Here’s both names with a pile of others I could live with…

Feel free to add any of your own suggestions below too. If people like them, I may do another poll next week with this week’s most popular, plus those. Sort of a ’round 2′.

Comics

Finally, last weeks poll concerned me making the occasional comic for the site. Opinions were mixed, but since making a comic would consume time I could be working on a game instead, they decided they’d rather just have the games.

I think my brain may need the occasional break from just doing games, but I’l see how I feel as time progresses. One possibility I’m considering is making a short comic to go with the advent calendar this year. I normally try to aim for something a bit special for the final day, and I think this could fit well.

Progress on April & Violet is going well. I’m still aiming for an end of October/start of November release. Currently, I’m going through the Violet sex scene, having finished Dylan’s last week.

However, since it’s supposed to be a mystery game, I don’t really want to post too much about it before release. Therefore, this week, I’m mostly going to talk about Leanna.

But first…

Last week I posted a demo of what I was considering using for the new games. In principal, I think it’s a good idea, but there’s clearly some bugs and issues to work out for it. Around 16% of people who tried couldn’t use it. That’s too high for me.

So, I’m just going to use the regular game style until I figure out how to make the new version work for everyone.

Leanna

As I said in earlier blog posts, Leanna is a TV journalist. She has an hour long morning show on a local TV channel.

I’m also keeping the theme that the player character is a photographer in this one, though I’m leaving it open enough so that you’re not necessarily the same character from The Photographer games, or Maddison, or any of dsp3000’s games.

Way back in February (I think), I floated the idea of taking inspiration from an episode of American Dad. In it, two main characters (Stan and Roger), go on a game show where the aim is to answer questions based on the other. For instance, “What is Roger’s favorite movie?”, then Stan has to correctly guess that it’s Millers Crossing. The main aim of this game is go on a game show like this with Leanna and win.

Initially, she intends to take part in the quiz with Kristen, her personal assistant. Leanna however, is not the nicest of people, and the two have a row, after which Kristen quits and leaves.

The player happens to be there at the time (they’ve been hired to take some promo shots of her), and soon finds out that Leanna doesn’t actually have any other friends. It is then that you can offer to go on the quiz with her instead.

The main body of the plot is the time that you and Leanna spend with each other in preparation for the quiz. You have to get to know as much about the other as possible. You also visit multiple places together and take lots of photos in order to fake your friendship. Obviously, I’m still at the start of production, but locations and scenarios include roller skating, horse riding, a party, and hiking.

Along the way, the player will have many opportunities to improve Leanna’s karma. Initially, she is not a very nice person, and the only reason the player agrees to help her is pity (though I may add some options for the motivation). Make the right choices, and she can gradually become a much nicer and caring person. It’s similar to improving Betsy’s confidence.

If you choose to however, you can also sabotage her ‘karma’, encouraging her mean behavior. Depending on how much you improve or lower her karma, you can get very different endings.

Obviously, April and Violet are the priority right now, so this game isn’t too far along (currently 42 images). I really wanted spend time getting the most of of using IRAY renders. I think I’ve finally nailed it in these image I rendered this week.

EDIT : I’m having some reservations about her face though. With this specific face morph, It’s really hard not to get her face looking weird when she smiles. I may change her face for the final game. Since I’m only 42 images into it (and she isn’t in 12), it wouldn’t be too much work.

I also have the title card up in the coming soon section now. Here’s the larger version if you want a closer look.

Hopefully, Leanna will be finished for Christmas, or very early in the new year.

This weeks poll

I’ve been thinking recently about the idea of doing some comics for the site. Basically just a series or rendered images with speech bubbles. It might mean it takes a week or two longer to create the games, as I will need to dedicate the occasional date to it, but it also means I get to do small, free (and maybe the occasionally paid) releases between. It could be using characters you already know from the games, or completely new ones.

What do you think?

EDIT : For instance, here’s an image from a comic I started working on a little while ago…

Tech stuff!

The sites have now been moved to a brand new dedicated server. This should mean everything loading a bit quicker, but more importantly no choking the bandwidth when there is a new release. If you were having trouble downloading games from the members section recently, I think this may have been the problem, so hopefully it should work for you now.

Final notes

While learning about the myriad things needed to get image looking good with daz studio and IRAY, I have now discovered the wonder of shaders. Particularly, how some of my older models can look with them. Here’s what crystal can look like with the new improvements.

I still need to do some more experiments with the setting, but I think it’s likely that Crystal Part 3 will be using something similar to this.

 

Right now, I’m working hard on the next members game, April and Violet. I’m happy to say that it is already about 300 images.

New engine

One thing I did not mention last week, was that I’ve slightly altered the game engine a little. Normally in my games, you hover over a hotspot on an image and a tooltip appears after a moment. This is fine on a desktop, but it can be a problem if playing on a tablet or phone.

Many, many more people are using using devices to play these games now. Compared to just 2 years ago when about 40% of players did, now it is up to a massive 97%. Here’s the full operating system list from the last 24 hours :

1.	Android	40,924	51.95%
2.	iOS	35,095	44.55%
3.	Windows	1,624	2.06%
4.	Windows Phone	707	0.90%
5.	Playstation Vita	209	0.27%
6.	BlackBerry	106	0.13%
7.	Nintendo 3DS	72	0.09%
8.	(not set)	21	0.03%
9.	Samsung	17	0.02%
10.	Bada	1	0.00%

For the new version of the game engine, I now have text that appears below the image. If you’re using a tablet or phone, just touch and hold your finger on the screen to find the hotspots, then tap to use it. Here’s the demo : www.vdategames.com/test/begin.html

Let me know any feedback below.

If your answer is no, please specify what went wrong below. Remember, if you don’t say what your problem was, I can’t fix it!

Extra stats

While I’m listing some statistics, here’s one more small set. While ago we were discussing which gender and ethnicity options were worth doing based on how many people use them. I never got around to posting them though, so here they are now :

White male – 63%

White female – 17%

Black male – 15%

Black female – 4.5%

So, white male is clearly the most popular option, but around 21.5% like playing as a female.

April and Violet will have all four options (for continuity if nowthing else), but it for Leanna, I’m going to try just white male and white female to save rendering time.

April and Violet

Not much to add for April and Violet. Progress is going well. The first sex scene (Dylan) is all done. Each of the three main women, April, Violet and Dylan, will be getting a sex scene where it’s just them and the player, with one final foursome scene at the end.

Leanna

As I progress quickly though that game, I’m also making slow progress through Leanna.

I won’t post too much of it until April and Violet are finished. Here’s an extra sample though, showing Kristen in her new role as Leanna’s personal assistant.

Anna downloads

As a final note, some people have contacted me saying that they are having issues downloading Anna. I’m not sure what could be causing the problem, but I’ve added a separate download option so that it is divided up into several smaller files. Your zip software should be able to join them together.

Now that MrStomper’s Anna is released, it’s time to bring you all an update on where my own games are at, because a lot has changed.

Last time I spoke about myself, I was working on a mystery game set at a motel and using characters based on the next generation Genesis models.

It was going well, but I started to have reservations. What I finally realized, was that I really liked the characters. They’re all very hot, and their personalities really started coming out. You see, I started off with the basic idea of doing something similar to Pool Party, where it would be fairly short, and would end in some sort of orgy. That worked well in the original Pool Party, but only because I used a set of characters everyone had already seen before.

In the motel game, I was rushing through introductions to get to the sex. It didn’t feel right. These new characters deserve more than that. So, what’s the solution? Expand the game? Maybe, but I really don’t like padding things out. The game is designed to be about 300-400 images. Well, how about doing a different game with them? Something big. Something inspired more by the style of Betsy. Who could be the focus? Well, Leanna has the most useful personality for it.

Within an hour, I had isolated the problem, and come up with a solution. Digging through the series of notepad files where I add notes whenever I get ideas, I assembled the basic premise of the new game in no time. Over the next few days, it developed into a nice long story about helping someone find herself and making friends with those around her at the same time, and I was very happy with it.

The only problem was that I’d already spent more time than I’d like working on the motel game, and if I really wanted to do this new one, I might not even finish it before Christmas.

Well, I already had the plot and the sets, so let’s use it. If I’m using Poser instead of IRAY, I could easily get through the entire thing in about a month. In order to avoid my original problem though, I would have to use characters I had already used before. Well, how about April and Violet from the Betsy game? That could work! They were popular, and players seemed to want more content from them. So, that’s what I’m doing!

That may not have been the most practical way of explaining my decisions, but I really wanted to give you a sense of what my internal monologue went though.

So, to summarize, the motel mystery game is now “April and Violet”, and I’ve re-purposed the characters I originally intended for that game into a new one with Leanna as the central star. Here’s the summaries for each of them…

April and Violet

Set several years after Betsy, You are travelling across the country by car. As night sets in, your only choice is to stay at the only motel you can see. To your surprise, you find April and Violet are also guests.

After some evening fun, and a good night’s sleep, you wake to find yourself trapped there. Yourself,  April, Violet, and the receptionist, Dylan, work together to discover what is going on, and how to escape.

I’ve kept the Dylan character from the first version, but had to remake her as a V4 to be compatible with Poser.

April and Violet will be a members only game. You will be able to select your gender and ethnicity, and it will all be in first person. Hopefully, it should only take me around a month to finish.

Leanna

While I’m making that game, I’ll also be rendering the occasional image for Leanna, and once April and Violet is released, I’ll be working on it full time.

I’ll get into more details over this game in later posts. For now I will say, that, as you can tell by the images below, Leanna is a local news anchor. Unfortunately, despite her likable on screen persona, she has a bit of a personality problem in real life. So, yeah, I’m going full ‘taming of the shrew’ for this one.

The game will see you befriending her, and trying to improve her ‘karma’. Kristen and Molly will both also have notable parts in it, similar to April and Violet in Betsy’s game.

All of the images will be rendered in IRAY, which looks great, but does take a little longer. Hopefully, this will be finished before Christmas though.

I am also planning to release this for free – sort of. When I released Betsy for free, a respectable amount of people signed up to the members section, though obviously not as much as when I release a members game. So, for Leanna, as an experiment, I’m going to try posting it in the members section on release, but then releasing it for free soon after. Maybe as soon as only a week later.

80% of new signups occur in the week after release anyway, so this could be a good system. If it’s successful, maybe it’s become a regular way of doing it. People can pay for it early if they like, or just wait an extra week and get it for free.

That’s all for this week. Next week, I’ll have more details on both games.

 

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Anna is now now available in the members section, for download or online play.

MrStomper has adjusted the images so that the entire game is about 815MB, much smaller than was previously mentioned.

I hope you all enjoy playing the game.

Next week, I’ll be returning to updates over my own games and lots of news that I think you’re going to like.

This week, I’ll be summarizing the next game for the members section, Anna, ahead of her release next Friday.

As stated in previous blog posts, Anna is the first game by a new contributor to the site, MrStomper.

Anna is your new neighbor. You find her upon returning home one day, struggling with boxes. Being the gentleman you are, you offer to help. While you do so, you can find out a little about the new woman in your life and, should you impress her enough, ask her on a date.

From there, the game follow a fairly traditional dating game premise. There are a series of locations with activities there. The ultimate aspiration is to impress her sufficiently, so that she invites you into her apartment at the end of the evening.

 

Locations in the game include both your and Anna’a apartment, a restaurant, the cinema, a nightclub, a bar, and the park. Expect the occasional familiar scenarios along the way, including the always welcome photoshoot.

Should you make it to the end and be invited into Anna’s apartment, sex may ensue, but there are many paths to follow. Some may just end with a blowjob, some end with sex on the couch, some with sex in the bedroom. There’s at least six main paths that I can find.

The game also includes checkpoints which activate at the of each location. So, for instance, if you don’t get the sex ending you want, you can just load up and see Anna inviting you in again.

There are also a nice section of unique scenarios to unlock through the game (achievements), such as spying on her in the shower, checking the images on her phone, or persuading her to use some naughty toys during sex.

Following a few tweaks after after the first version, the game is probably average difficulty of one of this site’s games. There are no gender or ethnicity options (you only play as white male). Finally, although the file size was reported recently as being 2GB, it will probably end up reduced in the released version. I’ll state the final file size in the blog next week when the game is released.

Anna is a very fun game. I’ve enjoyed playing it myself, and I think you’ll enjoy it too. For those of you undecided, there will be a free demo to play next week too.

Anna will be released, Friday September 23rd.

One last Update from MrStomper on his new game, Anna.

Hello again,

Today’s blogpost will continue right where the last ended, talking about the third section of the game.

The last section will be all where your hard work and dedication turned into an adequate reward. Depending on your performance you will be playing through “bases” (you all know the metaphors). You will still have to do your best, or you will fail. You might even have a bad date and but still get some action. It goes the  other way too, so you will have options to screw it all up. The next big thing of this section are the animations. It contains most of the game’s 40 animations and all of the “action” is animated.

The animations are not gifs but a series of images with the same quality as all the other pictures. And if you were wandering, there are 1022 pictures. The only disadvantage of the animations system is that it makes the game fairly large at 2 GB, so for the best experience, you should play it offline,
or the animations may not work properly.

The game should work offline for most people. There is a technobabble about it below, but if you are not interested just jump down for the naughty preview pictures I promised you:)
TECHNICALITIES

As stated above, the game has 2 GB and that is due to animations. This is the main reason why you cannot choose ethnicity as it will bloat the game to 4 GB and gender (8 GB) which is inappropriate for this kind of game. But the primary restriction of the gender are story reasons. [Chaotic – actually, I don’t think it would inflate the size by that much, but still I’d expect 2.5-3GB if you included gender and ethnicity]
Each animation is made up from at least 30 images and the biggest from 170. All together there are over 3000 pictures for animations. At 30 frames per second, downloading such number of pictures may cause problems when internet connection is slow. So, for the best experience, you should play the game offline. I have a working solution and a way how to compress the pictures into movies, but it only works with HTML5 and therefore will not work for many people.

Offline play should work for most people no matter the browser they use. The game uses both local storage (new engine) and cookies (old engine) and first it checks if your browser supports the new engine and lets you know that. If your browser supports the new engine, good, if not,  you may consider updating your browser (but if you do not want to do that, it’s OK) and the game will run on the old engine.
I have tested it with Opera, Firefox, Chrome, IE, Edge and Avast safezone.

DEMO

Demo version will be released the same day as the full game and it is the entire first section of the game and it contains all its the main features.

Easter eggs

There are few references hidden in the game. Some are hidden not so well in the ideal walkthrough, some are hidden better in the optional scenarios and one is hidden in the abyss. I don’t know how the total number of them as I did not make a track of them, but feel free to share your finds with others
in the comments after the game is released.

And here is the last batch of preview pictures.

MrStomper

Anna will be released for members on Friday, September 23rd.

It was actually supposed to be next Friday, but I’m going to be away for a few days around next weekend so it’s not very practical. Next week, I’ll add some of my own commentary on Anna to try and summarize what you should expect before the release the following week.

This week, more from MrStomper on his forthcoming game, Anna…

Hi again,

Today is about game mechanics and structure.
First, the game mechanics. Last week I told you that the game is difficult. That is because it is “wide” rather than “long” (but is long enough).  To easily navigate the game, it has a scoring system that shows your Influence on the girl and her Lust. These are the major governing variables of the game. About 30 minor variables will still be hidden from you. They manifest themselves differently.
Next to help you to explore is a checkpoint system. The game is divided into zones and at the end of each one you will be given a choice if you want to:
a) try again, restarting the game,

b) continue, advancing in the next zone and c) load checkpoint, starting the zone over with the entry values.
Important mechanic to help you are hints in pictures, mostly face expressions. That can be hard to pull off, so please, be lenient in your judgement.
Below is an example of reactions to an outcome.

 

Last thing to help you is that the game has 3 difficulty levels. Easy, Normal and Hardcore. The original idea was to have only one difficulty with Hardcore settings, but after feedback and testing it proved to be way, way to hard! Now it is toned down, but the option to play it at the original difficulty is still there, and it is the only way to see everything in the game. Easy mode helps you in the beginning, Normal mode provides optimal gaming experience and the  Hardcore mode unlocks one additional short scenario.

As for the game structure, it can be divided into three sections of roughly the same size. In the first one, you will meet the girl and ask her for a date. The second section is the date itself, where you will

have fun…

watch a movie…

meet new people…

<p><em>have some more fun…</em></p>

reminisce the good old times..

or fuck up horribly…

It’s up to you.

The last section will have its own blogpost next week. Together with some naughtier pictures, technicalities and some other things.

Till next week…

MrStomper

This week, the first blog post from MrStomper regarding his first game, Anna…

Hi all,

I hope you like surprises so I can pleasantly surprise you with a new quest game that is coming soon(ish)!

Because this is the first game I have ever done, the story is fairly simple. You meet a girl…

…you ask her for a date (or not), the two of you have a nice date (or not) and when it is done she invites you in her apartment (probably not) and you have wild sex with her (fat chance)! So what if it did not go according to the plan, at least you may have seen her naked in the shower…

This is how you will probably see the game after a first few tries? Because, even with a simple premise
the game has a few scenarios for you to discover and some of these scenarios are mutually exclusive
providing you with a little different experience as you try to discover the perfect walkthrough.
This is all, of course, based on your choices. Some of them will be right, some of them will be wrong,
some will have short term consequences and some (very) long term consequences. But none of them will be pointless! To encourage exploration, even the wrong choices will provide you will some information that will help you on your quest to ‘get the girl in bed’ and get to know the girl better.

And you will need that, because she will not jump on you just because you told her few nice words (you also need to get her horny). The game is intended to be more difficult than usual and it really isn’t easy.
But worry not, the game is also intended to be fun and not a chore. It has a scoring system so you can navigate in it more easily and it even has a checkpoint system.

And because I don’t want to bore you to tears, this is all for today and expect more information next week.

MrStomper

 

Thank you to everyone who’s been voting in the polls over the past few weeks. They’ve helped me make up my mind about how this game should work quite a lot, even if I’m not exactly going where the polls tell me to with everything.

For perspectives, the plan is this. The game will mostly function in first person, but I’m going to add a ‘cinematic mode’ button. Whenever you see it, you can click the icon (probably a clapper board), and it’ll switch to third person for a better view of what’s going on. It’ll be optional though. If you want to ignore the icon and just the play the game in first person, you can.

I’m reserving the right to just have it switch between first and third though. Having the switching option will probably mean rending two sets of images for things like the sex scenes (one set for each angle), and if it becomes too much work, I’ll probably remove it and just have the game switch between first and third person whenever it seems appropriate.

In order to reduce the amount of images I need to create, I’m also going to skip the option for ethnicity just this once. They’ll be back for Mia, but for this game I’ll just be having the gender options.

Here’s what each of the genders player characters will look like.

I’ve now fully started production of the game, and have a nice pile of renders completed.

There is also one final character I’d like to introduce this week.

This is Dylan. I didn’t mentioned her last week as she isn’t truly one of the main characters though. She’s the receptionist of the Motel who goes missing for most of the plot.

She’s still a notable character though, and the player of either gender will be able to have sex with her.

Last week, I also mentioned that I would be announcing something new and cool to the site, so here it is!

We have a new contributor to the site. You can call him MrStomper, and, similarly to dsp3000 has followed the tutorials to create his own game for the members section. Next week, you’ll be hearing from him about his own creating, Anna.