Widget goes on Vacation! (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Blacky here!

"I think I will introduce some swimwear to our cast in the rather not so far future, but for now, I rather focus on building new maps than doing any work on characters." ... was what I wrote 5 days ago on Charlotte's outfit post in the comments about what is coming next from my end.

Well, just a few hours after I sent this post I realized that the new map would require some characters to stage them there for a proper promo job and I absolutely had two couples at hand already (Clementine & Tristan as well as Penelope & Ray!) BUT then I thought....wait, we do have a mascot, why not her?

Well, she currently wears a hoody and long denim pants...hm, not the right outfit for the tropical island...gotta do something about it!

So here she is.

This was more than overdue for her. Working 24/7 for years , Widget now decided the time has come! Vacation. And that as soon as possible. While it's getting colder outside, she was certain: I wanna go south, chase the sun!

She booked the next flight she could get, rented a little "villa" on the outskirts of the tropical sea, swapped headset-visor for a cap and rough cargo pants for her best beach outfit and here we are!

I hope you like what you see, it was definitely something else to work on her again, now with a completely different approach.

Widget's vacation outfit will be a separate installment and exclusive to the cloud, mainly because she is in general already quite texture-heavy and two outfits simply don't fit into that one file. As a side note, the balcony will be the "home position" of the map so you will be able to create characters.

"Behind the scenes" section here:

Autosave feature is coming! We already have a working internal build for that as well so I'm very excited to officially announce that one.

Besides that, Dogson is further working on giving all toes weight painting for the upcoming feature for the interaction mode which will basically unlock toe movement on slider basis. I think I will be able to show you this pretty soon.

In parallel, Odes and I are working on the new map.

We intend to make movable props happen for this map and release. That means, you'll be able to shift chairs or beds around, make your characters drink coffee on the new balcony OR engage in a serious pillow fight!

Though I am currently showing you Widget right now, I literally used her as small detour while I work on maps.

Yes, plural.

I intend to get something out on the environmental end on every release for the next few months. My current plan is to start rather small in size but with maybe a total of three completely different settings, then expand those over time, cycling through them per release.

So the first one will obviously be this little tropical villa, which currently consists just out of one bedroom and the balcony for now, but I already have a plan for the full thing! Will take a while till it's fully built, but I plan to release in batches like "expansion packs" or however you want to call it. Imagine additional areas, like more rooms and such for now.

With that said, another map is currently taking shape and I hope we can get that one going within this year as well, gotta see.

I rather not promise too much for now but I wanna say, we all are working hard and a lot atm to get a really big one out this time.

Alright, so far so good, have a great start to your week and see you soon!

-Blacky