Hello! May is here and summer is getting closer, cold begone!

From now on, I'll be updating every 2 weeks now. Let's talk about NPCs and love interests!

I wanted to settle on the personalities of all the base characters, and I'm pretty happy about them now. I made multiple lists of scenarios that helped me flesh out the love interests (from now LI), like how each LI would react to being seen naked, being kissed in public, or what would they bring to differentiate themselves enough. I keep tweaking things, but this is how they're looking right now. Top then spots are the inn residents. One of the empty spots might be a male, since I feel silly having such an unbalanced ratio without any real reason, we will see.

I try not to talk too much about unfinished features, but way back I mentioned wanting the player to be able to see all content in a single playthrough. That was when I had a more linear approach to gameplay, nowadays it seems very unlikely.  I'm being very influenced by Tokimeki Memorial 2 at the moment, I'm fucking loving it, no dating sim I’ve played comes close. A lot of its greatness comes from the amount number of variables, man I wish I can capture a 5% of it. Taking girls out on special dates, means there's only 1 person you can spend those days with. I'll try not to be too restrictive, and there's some things I want to do more in groups, like multiple people going to the beach for special events, but yeah. I won't restrict you to play as long as you want, but I guess there has to be a canonical time limit, like 3 years.

Duckstation emulator. Invited her on a date to the beach. Seeing her so pumped and the beautiful sprites made me feel things.

So, about the spontaneous gameplay. Last month I talked about the time slots, and my plans to make characters still move around the map. After playing around with it, I still wished for some "urgency", so I ended up adding some time limit for the time slot, so characters are not endlessly roaming around until you do something, since if you wanted the character on a certain place you could just wait for her to cycle through all the possible spots.

Not getting technical, but it was a bit more tricky than anticipated, but I still got it. At first, each character could either have some free time (random places to go), or fixed schedules on the timeslot (Aya going from the inn to the bus stop in the morning). I really wanted to mix both, since the timeslots are lengthy enough as to not feel rushed, so I made it so characters have the randomized aspect along with hard coded behavior, in the same timeslot.

So now Aya on Mondays morning she has [SLEEP, FREE_TIME, GO_TO_BUS]. Since there's three elements, I divide the total amount of minutes of the timeslot by three, and pass it to the character to receive alerts when their timer is done, with a small variation of 5-15% to not have all characters receive the order at the same time and move more naturally.

Then on their free time, they can either go to certain spots if the spots are not occupied already, or they can go look for another character, including the protagonist.

For each character, I'm slowly assigning a value for how they see every other character, representing how close they are to them, so they go see characters they get along with, or directly never go see other characters they dislike / don't really have any relationship with (this is yoinked from Tokimeki as well, each girl is affected by how you treat the ones they are close to).

Already the non dateable NPCs have a bit over 50 variables, the LI way more. Apart from making it more lively, all this effort is so you can get caught either doing things you shouldn't. I feel some things are only exciting if there's some risk factor.

Aside from all that, some changes like the beach area and the farm being separated (didn't show it before). I tried to merge them back when I didn't feel they deserved to being their own, but nah I finally figured some things so I actually want to visit each place.
Some other small additions: like I finally discovered decals, which are textures that appear directly on materials, just so I could make footprints on the sand. Also the sun now rotates in the sky according to the time of day, so no longer fixed shadows. And multiple bugfixes of things that were bothering me for months.

This month I had even more complications with the PC so I just took it to a tech store (after I got the new warranty SSD, fucking PC almost fried the new one again), and the whole thing of Spain getting a power outage, so I'll postpone Patreon for the 14th. Thanks for reading frens :)