Intro

Hey everyone,

We're on the home stretch! This will likely be the final public dev blog before the next major update goes live. For my Patrons, I'll be dropping some exclusive goodies your way soon as a thank you for your support. Primarily NSFW content.

Alright, today we're pulling back the curtain on the second and final new girl joining the cast in this update: Lysandra. After we get acquainted, I’ll show off a couple of new minigames I built to keep my brain from melting while staring at animation timelines.

But first, let's meet the new girl.

Lysandra, The Retail Mystic

When creating Lysandra, I was obsessed with a single idea: a character who, by this island's standards, seems so completely normal that it gives you goosebumps. On an island crawling with lunatics, genuine normalcy is the most suspicious trait of all. When you meet someone new here and can't immediately pinpoint their particular brand of weird, the anxiety starts to creep in.

While I don't want to spoil all her secrets, I can give you the basics. She's the manager of the local clothing shop and is far more dedicated to it than her sister, who technically owns the place.

Now, about her name. Her name is Lysandra, but she’d really rather you didn’t use it. In her own words:

So, in-game, everyone will know her as Sandra. But here, in the safe confines of this dev blog, I'll call her Lysandra.

Make-Up & Clothes

While Kiri’s defining feature is her sharp, analytical eyes, Lysandra’s character is conveyed more through her overall presentation—specifically, her make-up and clothes. As her profile card mentions, she's perpetually sleep-deprived from single-handedly keeping the shop from collapsing. I thought it’d be a neat touch to give her more noticeable make-up than the other girls, a subtle mask to hide the exhaustion. That part was easy: a quick paint job on her eyeliner and lips in Krita, and that was that.

The clothes, however, were a different story. The clothes were a nightmare.

Almost every piece of her outfit immediately declared war on every other piece. The top clipped the shorts, the shorts clipped the accessory, the boots clipped themselves. It was a civil war. Shhh~! Yes, I know. I could simply change her clothes to something that works right out of the box, but I wanted this one!

While adjusting the models was easy enough, the real challenge was predicting how the game editor would interpret my changes. This began a long, painful ritual of exporting from Blender, importing into CharaStudio, seeing the mess, and going back to Blender to nudge vertices by what felt like microscopic amounts.

For some arcane reason, the distance I'd move a vertex in Blender wouldn't translate 1:1 in CharaStudio. Why? I have no idea. It's a mystery that haunts me even now as I type. Is it my fault? A bug? Your guess is as good as mine. After about a dozen attempts, I developed a sort of sixth sense for it and things finally started going smoothly.

Here’s the final result after every piece of clothing and accessory was beaten into submission.

You'll notice her boots are different from the profile card—I just swapped them out for a better model. That chain on her hip, however, is a perfect example of the 3D voodoo I had to perform. It looks wrong in the raw model, but it's a calculated offset that makes it sit perfectly after being imported and rendered in-game. Sometimes you have to make things look broken to make them work. Well... maybe not, but that's how it worked here.

And that's Lysandra for now! I’m leaving the rest for you to discover in the update.

Now, let's move on to the minigames...

Minigame #1: ~ Bingo Time! ~

Why add Bingo to a game like this? Because I like Bingo. That’s it. That’s the entire reason.

But this isn't your grandma's quiet church hall Bingo. This is a high-stakes battle of luck and wits against AI opponents. You'll progress through four tiers of escalating financial irresponsibility: Amber, Amethyst, Emerald, and Ruby. The entry fees get higher, but so do the prizes. It's the perfect way to make a fortune or lose all your money in a matter of minutes.

Of course, I know my own awful luck seems to have been hard-coded into the game's RNG, so I gave you a way to fight back. You can spend Skill Points on a suite of abilities designed to help you cheat the system. Need to mark a number that hasn't been called? Use Number Pluck. Want to mess with your opponents? Cast Confusion and watch them miss a mark. It's only fair.

(Don't mind those debug buttons at the bottom. Those are my personal cheat codes for testing, obviously.)

I’m not ashamed to admit I spent an unreasonable amount of time getting this UI just right. The alignment of the whole UI probably took longer than writing some key story moments. No regrets.

Minigame #2: The Sliding Puzzle Gallery

If Bingo is for when you want to leave your fate to the cruel whims of RNG, the sliding puzzle is for when you want to actively question your own intelligence. It's the digital equivalent of trying to fold a roadmap. Simple in theory, infuriating in practice.

(No, it won't be that easy in the released game. Here, the tiles were shuffled only a couple of times for a quick showcase.)

You'll slide tiles around to reveal images of the characters. The grid sizes start at a pleasant, confidence-boosting 3x3 and escalate all the way to a soul-rending 7x7 that will make you wish you were playing Bingo instead.

You’ll unlock new puzzles for each character as you progress through their stories.

And yes, you get paid for your suffering. The faster you solve a puzzle, the more currency you earn, effectively turning your frustration into cold, hard cash. It’s a win-win, assuming you don't throw your monitor out the window first.

And don't worry, I didn't skimp on the audio. Both minigames come fully equipped with music and sound effects to ensure the best possible experience while you're either winning big or losing your mind.

Outro

And that's a wrap for this dev blog! This is the last big public preview you'll see before the next update finally drops, so the next time you hear from me in a major post, it should be with a download link.

I'm also leaving one more surprise in the update. It's a new content feature so complex compared to everything else that it'll be classified as a prototype, until I get feedback from the community that it works flawlessly. You'll have to wait until release to see it for yourselves. But to add a little fuel to the fire: I'm fairly certain nothing like it has ever been done in an AVN before.

And, as always, thanks for the support.

Cheers,

Visq