(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)

Hey everyone. Development of v0.38 is winding down, so there probably won't be much in the way of exciting stuff to show off between now and the release. At this point I'm mostly just waiting for CGs, H-scenes, and voice acting to be done so I can implement them all, and until that point I'm expanding level designs, tweaking balance, and updating various things around the game, so this will be a relatively small update. That said, I do have one thing I want to show off this week!

Before I get started, I want to clarify that Area 5 is NOT going to be in v0.38 - I'm working on aspects of it now to get ahead of the game, but it's not going to be officially introduced until v0.39. With that out of the way, I dunno if anyone will be as excited about this as I am, but here you go, another preview of the Area 5 tileset:

As you can see, this tileset has had some pretty significant work put into it! Puffernutter has finally had some free time to devote to the game, and as she worked on it, I had an idea to give it some extra flair. After many hours of trial, error, and reworking the rendering pipeline, the effort resulted in what you see in the gif above - auto-animated background tiles, with VERY low performance impact, and no extra effort required when creating the tileset or tiling rooms!

This is what the tileset pieces look like normally. The effect works by using a shader to search for those bright pink pixels, and then removing them from the final image completely, essentially cutting out those pixels so you can see what's behind them. Behind the main game render, there's a scrolling, multi-colored texture, so when the shader cuts out those pink pixels, you can see that scrolling texture through those pixels. If you could see the texture as a whole it would look rather ugly indeed, but since only small amounts of it are visible through the tileset, it results in giving the tiles a rather unique and interesting animated border. I'm personally super excited about the way this looks; I'm not very artistically inclined, as far as actually drawing art goes, but I love finding ways to use programming to enhance the visuals of the game, it comes a lot more naturally to me.

Anyway, aside from that I don't really have anything to show off this week. Orex is still working on the Torguis H-scene, Red is still finishing the slime CG, and I spent the rest of my time this week on making more level designs and implementing conversations/voice acting.

Because of the animation and CG pipelines being so backed up, I'm afraid that there's not going to be anywhere near as much H-content as I wanted in this update - at best, we'll have the reworked Slime CG, the new Torguis H-scene, and the reworked Alraune BE H-scene. I'm looking into my options for increasing our animation speed output, and I'm hoping next update will be an improvement in that regard. I'm very sorry that this keeps happening; believe me when I say that I'm just as frustrated as you are that our porn content is falling so far behind the rest of the game's development, and I'm going to do my best to improve the situation, even if it means picking up animation work myself again. For this moment, though, all I can do right now though is ask for your patience, and give you my sincere thanks for sticking with us despite the setbacks; it truly means the world to us.