July Devlog - Itch, New Girls, and Future Projects (Patreon)

Hello there! Welcome back to another development log!

I've managed to find a good amount of time to work on my own projects this month which has been awesome. Normally this would mean that I have a ton of game progress to show off but this month has been a little different. This is largely due to me taking an extended break from game development after finishing Catgirl Care Chibi. I though I could make this month's devlog all about the release and my plans for Catgirl Care proper but some things came up and I think we should talk about that.

Catgirl Care Chibi

(shamelessly reusing a screenshot)

Catgirl Care Chibi is done! It's a finished video game! If you haven't tried it, check out the Beta 1.0 post over here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/catgirl-care-1-0-133077943

As I said in the intro, my plan for this month was to publicly release Catgirl Care Chibi and seek feedback to help plan Catgirl Care proper. I also wanted to take a bit of a breather and work on some smaller projects. That said, my plans went a bit sideways due to itch.io's recent payment processor fiasco.

For those who aren't familiar: Steam and Itch both have been forced by Visa/Mastercard (who were pressured by activists) to crack down on specific types of games. For those who have been paying attention, this isn't new. Tumblr banned all NSFW back in the day, Patreon has had troubles with adult content, and even Japanese sites are being targeted (DLSite, Nico Nico, Melonbooks, etc).

It might not be new, but I feel like I have to wait out the current Itch situation. Itch's removal of posts from the search algorithm is extremely similar to steps Tumblr was taking before their full ban. If itch pulled a Tumblr, I'd likely be caught in the mix along with all of my projects (including the sfw ones like Catgirl Care Chibi).

I don't expect this to happen. Itch has been fairly clear about what they are doing and why but I'm delaying Catgirl Care Chibi's public release a month or two just to feel things out. They have a list of prohibited content, and, while my work is extremely tame compared to everything on that list, I want to be sure that "animal-related" does not apply to my furry games (Date a Mink, Date an Otter, The Blind Date Game, and Date a Mink 3D) or even my monster girls (is a dragon girl a furry by their metric? It doesn't say).

So, sorry for the late devlog and late public release! I'm keeping a close eye on Itch and I'll let you all know what I decide!

New Character Designs

Normally when I release a new game project, I like to try and work through my backlog of characters I want to design. Currently, I have a pair that I'm working on character designs for that have been overdue for a while now and I'm always tempted to draw a few more girls. That said, those characters aren't quite ready to show off on this devlog.

That said, I can talk about Honey, who I took time this month to redesign!

(Higher resolution available on my website)

Honey's old design kept me from drawing her or putting her in art polls but I'm far more comfortable with her now and I think she's a good fit for Dreamscape's clumsy best friend. If you aren't familiar with Honey (I haven't drawn her in a while), she's a cute geek who is secretly sharing her room with Dreamscape. She like girls and I've always planned for her to find a cute girlfriend at her university. I still plan to tell that story some day so I won't spoil everything here!

Anyhow, I hope you all like Honey's redesign! Expect more characters for art poll shenanigans soon!

Godot Experiments

While I haven't started work on Catgirl Care yet, I haven't been ignoring Godot. Above, you can see my 3D pixel art experiment (based on this video by David Holland). I've had the idea to create a tennis game inspired by the sports-RPG format of the Mario Tennis titles as well as a bit of classic Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh!'s battle city arc. As part of that idea, I've always envisioned this project as faux pixel art and I've started to experiment to see how feasible that would be.

At first, I thought I'd need to do some magic to make each object pixelated but it turns out that locking the camera and objects to texels and displaying that on a texture that slides for sub-pixel smoothness works really well. I've also created a simple technique with Godot's animation player that limits the framerate fairly convincingly and can create those pixel-art style animations your eye expects.

There's still more to test here but I'm having fun and I thought I'd share some results with you all. Don't be surprised if I suddenly announce a tennis game in the future!

Planning Catgirl Care

I'm planning to start development on Catgirl Care this upcoming month. I already have a rough design document written up and know what the first demo should look like. It should be fairly straightforward - everything I've worked on up to this point has been in preparation for this game after all.

The first step will be creating a new character model and a basic catgirl customization screen. I don't expect this screen to have much to show off with the first beta but it should at least prove character creation will work with the capacity to scale up. After that, I just want to create a simple scene for a catgirl or two to explore in and make sure they can be pet (very important).

Simple beta's focused on smaller features are my goal going forward. I want to be able to get feedback as I go while also having something for public players to toy with while Patreon supporters (that's you!) are always one demo ahead.

Hopefully I'll have a lot of Catgirl Care development to show off next month!

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Anyhow, thanks for continuing to support me, especially right now. Itch has been a huge part of my income and most of my projects have taken a hit from this month's search delisting. I'm hoping I can continue to make cute and lewd stuff worthy of your support!