Poll Results and 10.4 Plans

Greetings - I hope you had a wonderful New Year! This time I have some news today about upcoming releases, as well as results from the last poll. So without further ado, let's get started!

Ana Weight Poll Results

First up are the poll results. In case you forgot, in mid-November I put up a poll featuring three different versions of Ana's character model, which differed primarily in weight. Before discussing them, I'll give the results; as per usual, this aggregates results from both sites:

To recap the reason for this little experiment: Ana being a bit overweight is something that everyone comments on, including Ana herself, but her character model is conspicuously *not* overweight. This disconnect can be a bit jarring, thus I decided to make a couple of heavier versions of Ana to see what they looked like and what everyone thought about them. And it seems that a slight majority prefers Ana to stay the way she is.

I'm still leaning toward making her a bit heavier than she is now, just so the disconnect isn't quite so glaring, but given the poll results I'll probably keep it on the skinnier end. Something between the "current" and "chunky" ones, perhaps?

Upcoming Releases

10.3.1

The first one out of the gate will be 10.3.1, which will feature a slight improvement of the game's H-scene images. H-scenes are all made at 2448 x 1872 resolution, then resampled down to 816 x 624 to fit the game screen. I just used Photoshop's default for downsizing most of the time, but it turns out the resampling algorithm used can have a noticeable effect on how the image looks at lower resolutions. Here's a couple of examples:

The first of each pair uses Photoshop's bicubic automatic (the default), and the second uses the best (and slowest) algorithm from Affinity Photo. The differences are subtle, but the one from Affinity looks much sharper - which is important at this low resolution. So the plan is to make all the H-scene images look like that. Shiri's Futa Magic scene (all of which was done in Affinity) already uses it, which is why it may look a little better than some previous ones. (The color profiles are also screwed up in a few scenes, and this is a chance to correct those, too.)

I'm still trying to decide what to do about the shinestone situation; that is, the new Ana scene in 10.3 requires a shinestone to get, and the only one currently in game is in that hard room from the second visit to the Oracle. Players who aren't super-enthusiastic about puzzles may have bypassed this with easy mode, locking them out of the scene in the current build. I'm leaning toward addressing it in 10.4, since I don't want to make a quest just for a shinestone, and I think I can add one pretty naturally when you're first exploring the Commercial District. Which brings me to:

10.4 & 10.5: The Commercial District

The Commercial District will finally (re-)open in 10.4. 10.4 will be a fairly limited release, though; it will probably only include 2-3 quests, one of which will be the reopening quest itself (the other definite one will be Ana's 'date' quest.) Also, several buildings won't be open yet. It might be more accurate to think of 10.4 as a preview of the Commercial District rather than the full thing. For the best experience I'd recommend waiting for 10.5, which will introduce the rest of it as well as a few other quests.

Why put out such a small release? The short answer is so that I can get it out quicker. One of my big goals for this year is to get releases out regularly, and I think the best way to do this is to give them a smaller scope. The goal is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 months per release. Note that this is not a promise, it's a goal - but one I'll try to meet! Also note that I don't intend to put out half-baked releases, just smaller ones.

10.4 is already well under way; most of the District is already mapped, I've done all the planning work for the first quest, and I'm now preparing to write it. The goal for 10.5 is to fill out the Commercial District a bit more - open all the buildings that weren't open before, and add another 2-3 quests that 10.4 will set up. 10.6 is a little more hazy - there's still some "fun" quests I want to do in and around town before stuff with the final guild starts, and I also want to make another H-scene. Haven't decided which will happen first, but it will be one of those two, followed by the other, and *then* you'll start trying to recruit Bloodfist. The Bloodfist stuff will culminate in another big dungeon - Dark Pits style - then things in Zameroth will begin wrapping up.

Conclusion

I'd previously said 10.4 would be another poll-driven H-scene, but I'm itching to get back to the story - and I suspect you are, too! Not to worry, though - there will be other H-scene polls. Please let me know what you think about the Ana weight thing, and thank you for your support!