WEEKLY POST - February 9th 2025 - Travel Map and a style change!

Hey there, my fellow Grems, Hobz and Gobz.

What's up this week?

• I've added a neat little "Gobbo Games" splash screen animation. It's a little dumb, I know, nothing crazy or super fancy, but I like it.
• I did some optimizing in my code to account for the scope expansion beyond Chapter 1.
• I squashed a bug related to the Inspection gameplay, and another related to the Gallery. Those will be deployed when I'm ready to deploy the Prologue.
• I did a couple of small UI improvements.
• I added the Travel Map feature, which is meant to do several things : allow you to see what locations you've unlocked, allow you to travel to those locations if I'm allowing you to, if I'm not forcing you to travel to a different location at the end of a scene. There is more to do in regards to this UI, but it's coming along quite nicely.

Style change:

I've spent the past few days experimenting with Forge-UI and a whole bunch of new checkpoints to nail-down a new style for Elena. I think you might agree with me, Elena's sprites in V1.0 can be quite uncanny looking, especially around her eyes.

Thing is, the old sprites were done with the base Automatic1111 Stable Diffusion and an old checkpoint inherited from my work with StrongGirls, a checkpoint which the author of StrongGirls himself stopped using months ago.

After thinking about it, I was simply not willing to put myself again through the amount of manual editing I had to do to get the old sprites, which already weren't great.

So I went through a lot of trial and error to get the result below:

The main thing I wanted to do was to make sure Elena's core features were still there in some way. The choker, the white shirt with a Jojo reference, the sash (which is now a sweat-shirt tied around her waist), and the skirt. I wanted to keep all of that, and make sure that I could add muscle onto her without the result looking like shit. I won't show you her muscular or more NSFW sprites here and now, but I'm pretty happy with the results! Bonus, I think she looks cuter and nicer!

I might still do some more changes next week, but the main focus will be to animate that new sprite.

With that, I will also do some touch-ups on the old V1.0 background (namely Elena's apartment and her bathroom).

Discord and chaos:

This week, I've also been doing a little bit of networking, talked with a bunch of cool creators (like the goose which is loose, HJONK), which brought some life to the Discord server. Shout-out to m'boyz Soundwave, Yargilfist and Zero1Crazy! Woop woop!
With that, the server has gotten a lot better, with more channels waiting to be filled with lots of stuff, and a bunch of new roles you can give yourself to stand out as an AI-Artist, a Traditional Artist, a Writer, the VIP Creator of another game, or one of Elena's Shameless Simps.
Join us now! We have cookies.

Incoming polls:

If you're part of my fellow Hobz and Gobz, you might've participated in last week's creative polls. The results so far have been super interesting and I'm quite curious to see where this could lead. Either way, the current results are pointing toward some heavy changes to the existing Chapter 1!
I have a few more polls coming to go into more details with you guys.

Cheers!