A Small Carnival Area For Midnight City. I Still Need To Blend Out The Gradient On The Ambient Light

Made hoodie and tank top versions of Kage's chibi sprites. The face set next to that is for Koyomi, childhood friend of the MC. She'll be introducing the player to the various "love interests" (aka Kage rivals)

Finishing up the Yurei intro today too. Will try to work on a few other things, maybe some sprite art or something

Yesterday I added the actual mechanics into the game for leveling up the cats at the café, and added a feather toy. Each cat activity makes 1 hour of in-game time pass per round (but in reality takes less than a minute). No worries though, when you're not doing specific activities, time passes normally in the game (1 minute in game is 1 real life minute etc.). So no need to rush.

You may or may not be thinking, sheesh just move on from the cats already and get back to work on the main point of this game; dating and yandere harassment! To which I say:

I'm sorry

I will be working on more of the hand drawn sprites of the guys for White Day events next

Kage meltdown is coming soon

Please look forward to it

He wishes you would :/

I spent most of my project time yesterday researching some specific things about the game's engine, like whether a certain mechanic would be possible etc. It all came back as good news, though I can't say what all of it was since it would kind of spoil some of the fun in playing to know ahead of time.

But what I can say is that I think I'll be able to release the game in installments and people should be able to carry their save files over between each of them, which is one thing I wasn't sure would be possible. It will just require a little bit of planning ahead of time on my part, since adding certain things to a new installment would break old save files (mainly plugins or certain types of scripts requiring data initialization at startup).

So as long as I make sure all the plugins I want to use for the game are already implemented at the first launch, there shouldn't be any problems with people playing the whole thing across one save file through multiple releases/"expansions" or whatever. And of course, I can't delete anything from the new installments that already existed in the former ones.

So that's exciting, because it means I can release a playable game sooner, though I still don't have a release timeframe set yet. What I would like to do is release 1 love interest route at a time, starting with Yurei. And obviously Kage will be in that first release and all subsequent ones because he just won't fucking leave you alone

I don't know if this has been asked before, but why did you decide to name it 2 headed boy?

Oh cool question :)

It's in reference to the poster boy of the game (the "yandere"), Kage, for a few reasons. To describe the duality of his nature (he has sort of "Jekyl/Hyde" mood shifts) and how he tends to "split" on the player throughout interactions.

He often sees the player in extremes of all good or all bad, and feels things very intensely (though the "all bad" moments are more temporary unless you're really relentless with building his toxicity and anxiety stats).

He's "of two minds," when it comes to how he thinks the player feels about him, which is a consistent source of his anxiety that can be mitigated with varying degrees of success by the player (or made worse).

And then finally, it's also the name of 2 songs by Neutral Milk Hotel, 2 Headed Boy parts 1 and 2, and I think the lyrics of both songs also really fit his overall vibe. Especially part 2

Hey love the updates so far!! I had two questions (if its okay and you want to answer)

Are the other suitors aware of Kage before our MC comes into the picture and what are their opinions of him? Is he kinda just thought of a loner/creep by everyone or do they have a different view?

I also saw that in some stills Kage appears to be in our house, can we do things like cook for him or even give him gifts like the other suitors?

Hey thank you :) the other guys are aware of him to varying degrees, since they all live in the same apartment complex as MC/player, they have at least seen him around. Yugen is more "aware" of him than the other 2 rival guys/suitors, as in he knows more about Kage where the other 2 just know he lives in the apartment complex.

Yes, they all see him as a creep, as he not only avoids all of them but kind of just always has a hostile expression/looks unapproachable, and they all get a sense something is seriously off with him.

I think the stills you're referring to are actually the player in Kage's apartment. They all have the same floor plan and even wallpaper iirc so they look similar but have different furniture/decorations.

You can give Kage things and do things for him the same as the other guys, yeah :) it gets a bit... messy because one of the guys will always be a "rival" to him since everyone is worried for MC's safety in relation to Kage ^^; but yeah you totally can

I started adding shops and items beyond just the food court to the Midnight City Mall, plus a few aimlessly wandering NPCs.

There's the book/plushie store and clothing store made so far, planning an electronic store and a shoe store next, along with a little noodle shop. Unfortunately all the items besides food are only gifts for your love interests for now (you can't equip clothing and have your character change outfits). Maybe after I release the game I'll patch that in, but for now I'm trying to mainly focus on features that directly impact gameplay/the storylines (gifts being a mechanic for boosting stats with love interests).

I also have a crafting/cooking system, and those gifts give better stat boosts with the love interests than shopping, but I haven't implemented the recipes/ingredients for those yet.

Also I finally actually put the banking system into the ATMs. Player gets a fixed amount of money every Friday deposited to their account, so you will need to budget somewhat in-game. Will add small ways to make extra money too at some point!

Reminder to take a break and drink some water!

p.s your working on the game rather quickly from what I’ve seen with developers it can take months / years to get to the point you’ve shown us and your doing amazing! Be careful of getting burnt out tho!

Oh wow ty :> I feel like I still have so far to go, like I'm still in the phase of laying the foundation for the game I guess, getting all the menus set up and working through mechanics, making maps, adding assets...

I've done a bit of writing the story into the game, but I decided to backpedal a bit with that progress as I feel there are likely more efficient ways to do certain things in the story and just within the engine, and I'll know those methods if I get the other parts set up first y'know?

But once that part is all done I can really just focus more on writing and drawing, and any future installments should theoretically take less time than the initial release since the framework will already be there.

As far as burnout, for sure! It probably doesn't seem like it but I do try to take time for myself too. It was finally nice outside today so I took a nice long motorcycle ride, since my lungs haven't recovered enough yet from being sick for a bicycle ride. And of course I took breaks to just wander around and enjoy the sunlight 🤍

Tysm friends I'm only like 4 days old on here.

Great motivation to keep working on my yandere boyfriend game 🩶

Samples for 1st LI's sprite animation, Yurei! Now I can start working on a design for the final love interest option...

Quick update, someone politely inquired about the pronoun setup in my game project yesterday, and to be honest I hadn't given it much thought.

But I decided, what the heck why not just decouple the player sprite's appearance from their in-game pronouns so they are separate questions when you're setting up your character at the beginning.

So you can use the feminine sprites with masculine pronouns or vice versa. I'll also add a 3rd set of "they/them" that can go to either sprite set too.

Not a hard thing for me to do and I'm sure it would make some people happier and nobody less happy, so that's a net positive for the game, and that's what we aim for here in my brain world. It's early enough in development that I don't have to revisit very much of what I already wrote into the game either so it's really nbd on that front.

Anyway will try to work on that sometime today if I get time between working my normie job