I'm going to start this very belated devlog by extending a huge thank you to everyone that has shown support for this project while I was missing in action. Long story short, I was in a nasty car wreck and recovery took a long time. Good news is I am fine now and the unexpected time away from working on Waifu Island provided me with some clarity; after returning and sitting down for my first gamedev session, it became immediately clear to me what direction I needed to start heading in, what was working for the game, and most-importantly what was not working.

Sandbox Mode won't be ready for a while but it is my main focus now that I am back in the saddle. Unfortunately, since I lost so much time that should have been spent working my day job, I had to make this break even longer than I wanted in order to rally up some cash to fund development. With that all behind me, I've spent quite a bit of time the last two weeks reworking and cleaning up the project so that I can work more efficiently while also cutting out things (nothing that was really shown in devlogs yet, no worries there) that weren't working and were subsequently holding up progress. I've also spent a lot of time adding new features, and these new features are what I will be covering in this post. I will focus on the planned changes to Sandbox Mode with my next devlog and should also have information on what will likely precede it as far as the release schedule is concerned: the prologue for Story Mode. On top of what I'm about to go over, there are also multiple bug fixes and quality of life improvements that I've made and will be releasing as soon as I have everything wrapped up neatly with a bow. With any luck these will be ready to go public by the end of the month.

Moneyshots

No sense in holding back here, you've all been patient and I wanted to come back strong (pun intended). This new feature has been something  I've wanted to put in place for quite a while now but, before my accident, every attempt to pull it off yielded less than desirable results. This time around I am very, very close to having this all working just the way I want it, so while I'm finishing it up I figured I'd share some of the earlier test recordings I made last week.

Gone are the flat, boring, and unrealistic particles for cumshots; they've now been replaced with physics-based fluid mechanics. This update is still a bit more performance hungry than I'd like it to be so I'll be focusing on optimization in several areas during the next week or two and will hopefully have a second draft done and ready to share soon. If you're wondering whether or not this feature will be included in the upcoming prologue I mentioned earlier, the answer is a resounding YES! Keep in mind while watching the above clips that I used a temporary project to get the first draft done and I didn't bother importing my custom shaders so things might look a little different.

Dialogue

After several attempts that all yielded mediocre results but also taught me what not to do, I've finally decided on a dialogue system for use in Story Mode. The bulk of the work here is not in what the player ends up seeing but in how I string these conversations along in a node-based custom editor that allows me to easily add multiple responses, fire off an event at any time, and even play specific animations and/or audio clips with ease. Don't mind the flaccid writing in the video below, I just tossed this together as quickly as possible to test this new system out and didn't put much thought into the discussion itself, but the important takeaway from this is that I can whip up a dialogue chain in just a few minutes, meaning when it comes time to really dive into Story Mode, I can sit back and write with confidence knowing that all I need to do is tie together some nodes and pick what animations/sound I want to play when.

Demon Waifu

Yet another item that was on my to do list for a long time was making use of the demon waifu character I had at the ready but could never get tied into the clothing/character system I'd created for customizing waifus. Again, my forced time away from the office as I healed from the accident played a key role in coming up with a solution to this problem, and as a result I can say without a doubt that the demon waifu I really wanted to have available for the story is doable (again, pun intended). The video below is just a quick tease to give you a sense of this character, and while all of the pieces that make her up won't be available in the changing room, some of them will be in a later release and she will also play a key role in the main story, so you can expect to see more of her in the future.

What's Coming

Unfortunately, I don't have the project clean-up done yet and I don't want to post updates that are likely to introduce new bugs until I've had time to really go over everything and test it fully. As a result, there is no update with this devlog, but one is slated and there's already quite a bit listed in the release notes for it. On top of the bug fixes and QOL updates, I've added a few new clothing items for you play around with. I've also got a waifu card for Meru at the ready and will be sharing it to the game forum shortly. I'm also hoping to finally be able to share the fix for underwear clipping through the waifu's crotch in certain poses and during certain animations, but I am not 100% sure that will be ready in time. You'll also notice that the character options for the changing room have been rearranged a bit to make room for another new addition: body freckles. This slight adjustment will also provide me with additional UI space for a lot more tattoos and perhaps other options that I haven't even considered yet.