Last night I released the final version of Serenity’s first chapter to the next tier on my patreon. In a few days, it will (officially) go public. Keeping fingers crossed it is well received. I feel accomplished, but slightly doubtful because some may think it’s too short. I just wanted to keep each build as small as possible. I render a lot more images per/dialogue than most games out there, so it’s easier for my games to get bigger in file size quicker. I chose this path based on my own preferences from playing VN’s. For me, seeing facial expressions, movement, gestures, etc., during conversations makes it feel a bit more alive. I hate reusing images or sitting on one still image for many lines of dialogue (I see that in a LOT of VN’s). And this is probably the reason I decided to keep mine ‘kinetic’ – no branching choices. It would take me months if I had to render 2, 3, or 4 times as many images because of different paths. So, I try to focus on creating a well-written story. I’m not perfect by any means, but I think I am getting better at it the more I do this. And also, beautiful characters are a must of course.

With the first chapter of Serenity completed, now I get to open up my second project, Last Human. A sci-fi story with all Neko girls and a single human male as the protag. Sci-fi is my favorite genre. I’ve written short sci-fi stories over the years, one of which LH will get a lot of content from. Last Human will run similar to a TV series – in that, it will have “seasons” (one season will be one ‘build’), and each season will have episodes (each update will be the next episode). And I plan to have an episode gallery (much like a replay gallery) where one can quickly jump to an episode and play through it. Because I am certain my readers will have “favorite episodes” and instead of forcing them to remember to make a save at the beginning of each episode, they can just jump to it from the episode gallery.

Last Human began life as one story but has been rewritten to something quite different from the vision Nope and I shared when we first worked on it. I didn’t rewrite it because I didn’t like what we had done though, I loved what we did. When I first decided I wanted to revisit that project, I felt it could be better. So, I came up with an idea where I could turn it into a series that could be ongoing. My vision for it is something akin to Star Trek. A group of Neko girls as the crew serving under the Captain – the ‘Last Human’ from Earth, going on adventures and running into interesting, dangerous, scary, or cool things.

Following are spoilers, but nothing too major. Captain Trent is stuck on Earth, which has become an icy wasteland. Before the rest of civilization died off, the world’s leaders got together and started building a starship named Aurora. It was built by thousands of nanobots. It now sits in orbit, completed by Trent once he managed to hack into the network and gain control of the nanobots. Last Human opens up with the Captain preparing an old NASA rocket for rendezvous with the space station where Aurora is docked. His intention is to survive on the ship, which is very technically advanced. His days are numbered as the Earth’s core is on the brink of destabilizing completely. But then he receives some unexpected company. Two Neko girls with no way back to their world, arriving through an artificial wormhole they created.

I’m thinking it will take 2 to 3 episodes to get us to the point where we have our full crew and Captain together on the Aurora, and off on their exploration of space. I won’t go into any more details because I don’t want to spoil the fun, but there are quite a few details between the lines of everything I said above.

Right now, I have most of the first episode written already. I recently acquired some new assets I’ll be needing for graphics, and I am currently working on the gui for the game. I don’t usually spend a lot of time making a fancy gui because I want to get to the point of all this – the story and the imagery. But I am being nagged by other dev friends to make fancy buttons… I’m looking into doing that, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve already removed the dialogue box and changed the font so that it’s going to be white with a shadow. I find this to be a bit better because you can still pretty much see the image under the text. Hopefully everyone likes that. I may do the same thing with Serenity Chapter 2 when I get to that point. In fact, on that front I’ll probably also add the episode gallery because beginning at that build, Serenity will also be released in ‘episodes’.

Well, time to get back to work. It’s Friday and that means I’ll have the weekend to focus purely on LH and not having to deal with my full-time job. Between catching up on custom CG art for my Crown tier and work on LH, I have a very busy weekend ahead.

…Fire