Development Update 41 (Patreon)

Hey guys,

It's been a little while since my last development update, for which I apologise. I've been busy working on the script for the staff training sessions as well as creating a new storyline for Maxine, following on from the recent poll result. As I said last time, the sponsored outfits option won the poll. I hadn’t planned to spend that long on this storyline, however, I quickly realised that providing what I had promised in the poll was going to require quite a bit of setting up. Maxine’s fundraiser has now been expanded to be one of the biggest single “events” in the game spanning an entire in-game week. It features nearly all the girls to varying degrees with an exciting surprise ending.

A look at the first day of Maxine's fundraiser. The event spans a full in-game week and features nearly all the students.

As well as new content we are continuing the improvements to the code which we began in the last update. One of the things my team is working on at the moment is a new “easy mode”, which gives bonuses to grades and discipline in the early game as well as reducing the cost of items. This should help those that found the early game to be a little too "grindy", as well as making it more fun for those who just want the story. The easy mode can now be toggled on and off at any time with the game's preferences. We are also working on a way to make it more obvious to players if it's possible to level up a girl before starting a private punishment. As well as a way to autocomplete punishments (as an option in easy mode) for people who struggle with the numerical puzzles.

In other news, I was lucky enough to get my hands on an Nvidia RTX4090 graphics card a couple of weeks back. For those of you who aren’t hardcore tech enthusiasts like myself, the RTX4090 is, without a doubt, the most powerful consumer graphics card available at the moment and it's an absolute beast. I missed out on Nvidia's 30 series as I couldn’t get one for love nor money over the pandemic. Then by the time they were back in stock, the 40 series had already been announced and it made sense to wait. I wasn’t going to miss out this time around, so I snatched up one of these bad boys as quickly as I could. I’m still playing around with its capabilities and it will be a little while before I unlock the full potential of this monster.

Hello sexy!

The graphical quality of my renders is mostly limited by the software I use as opposed to the hardware. However, I had found myself bumping up against the capabilities of my old computer quite a bit recently, especially when recording animations and trying to keep steady frame rates. This caused me considerable challenges when recording the new animations for the girls' dorm showers. In those videos, keen-eyed observers may have noticed the girls' bottoms jiggling in a way we hadn't seen before in the game. Up until very recently, I was only able to animate the girls' buttocks manually, by setting the positions frame by frame. This made it possible to add jiggling in the spanking animations. However, in animations where the girls are moving around (for example the twins' naked walk in the swimming pool or the dance scenes) the girls' behinds remained disappointingly rigid. A newly developed soft body model adds physics to the girls' bottoms, thighs and tummies allowing them to all jiggle automatically. It’s always easier to show than explain these things, so here’s a quick video I made as a demonstration with Priti dancing in front of mirrors.

A demonstration of the new soft body physics click this link to view the video

As you can see in the video (and in the recent videos in the girls' showers) the new technique looks promising. Unfortunately, my old computer was really struggling to keep a constant frame rate, even with only one or two girls' bouncy parts moving around. My new computer on the other hand handles it well. Even with two mirrors in the scene (which normally kills the frame rate entirely), I was still able to record in 4K at 60 frames per second. This is all excellent timing, as I plan to finally tackle the volleyball games in version 0.15 and you'd better believe there is going to be a lot of jiggling. I am going to need all the computational power I can get my hands on. In addition to better animations, the new hardware should make it easier to create big crowd scenes too, as you can see in the preview image for Maxine’s fundraiser. Previously any file with this many characters would be too laggy to get much meaningful work done.

So things are coming along well for the next update with some great storylines and some new graphical capabilities. However, I am a couple of weeks behind where I hoped to be at this stage, mainly because Maxine's fundraiser ended up being a lot bigger than planned. On top of that, a personal medical issue means I am going to have to take two weeks off from today. I'll spare you all the unglamorous details, but rest assured it's nothing serious and I'll be back at my desk as soon as possible. Unfortunately, though this does make meeting my initial estimate for the release very unlikely. My new target for the beta release is sometime around the end of the year, so still not that far off.

Altos