Where's The Update?

So, why has the update been so late?

The short version of it is that my life is chaos. I've had an inconsistent mental state to battle with (being genderfluid) that only recently feels like it's resolved, I've had physical health issues, my living environment has stopped being safe, and the holidays and family events were nonstop (my sister is getting married relatively soon and it's been so much stuff to help plan even from the sidelines) and dealing with all of this has eaten up a lot of my time and energy.

The exceedingly long version of it is here.

My life has gotten complicated, but that's not to say that I've been slacking off with re:Dreamer. I've still been pulling off at least the 30-hour weeks I consider to be mandatory for the timeline of ever getting this game done (I might have had one week that was 20 hours, but I was sick as a dog), and I've had a number of 60-hour weeks.

As I might have mentioned somewhere, what I have is currently just under 3 times longer than the Britney Day 2 arcade date, which also took four months to get out. But unlike that update that created good but brief story content and... "middling" interactive minigames that in hindsight were a bad idea, this update tackles writing, which is hopefully what you are here for.

That current writing focuses on fixing up the Keisuke Day 1 sentō scene, which is by far the messiest extant writing I have (just barely beating out the Keisuke Day 3 frat party) and frankly does not fit with how I have been making Keisuke a nicer, more developed character than the cardboard cutout of a frat boy himbo jock his earliest writing had.

Spoilers ahead; stop reading here if you don't want those.

I can't show screenshots of almost any of the screens in the build without covering Keisuke and Zoey's nude sprites via the "disallow nude sprites" setting, but this update tackles some important things I left out of my earlier, sloppier writing, such as:

The guilt Zach feels for dragging Keisuke into this sex game without realizing it and his hesitancy to participate in it (but not as much guilt and hesitancy as Zach should probably feel):

Zach's discomfort at his perceived lack of masculinity:

Zach's even more prominent discomfort at his perceived lack of heterosexuality and how he aggressively overcompensates for it:

Zach and Keisuke briefly reminiscing about certain parts of their near-shared childhood with the context of hindsight, them having somewhat drifted apart during and after middle school, and how Keisuke is now a man and Zach is now a woman (at least physiologically):

Keisuke trying his best in a supporting role for Zach, even if some of it is awkward and makes Keisuke come off as slightly bicurious (which is the point):

And how Zach might try to get over his hesitancy of getting intimate with Keisuke of his own volition with an offer to escalate their relationships firmly into "friends with benefits" territory (this is a player choice; Zach otherwise gets into an argument and a reworked version of the tripping scene HCG comes into play instead):

I've covered how I've reworked the handjob scene with new expressions, new pose variants, and better art, but I've done the same for that tripping scene. Unfortunately, having sex inside the sentō isn't in the cards with this update given not only the overdue time constraints but the nicer Keisuke and more hesitant Zach than the earlier writing had, but those HCGs are still planned for future use in the story.

This writing is also very branching based on the choices Zach made back in Keisuke's dorm room.

Zach can be a "softcore" yandere trying to get exclusivity with Keisuke by wooing his interest in Zoey while not admitting Zach has interest in Keisuke (like the bisexual disaster in denial Zach is):

Or he can be a broken Zach/Zoey suffering through a deeply personal betrayal of getting incredibly hurt by the one person beside his grandpa he trusted to never hurt him who is either looking to throw himself at Keisuke and beg for forgiveness or make Keisuke fall in love with her so when Zach turns back into a guy in 6 months his heart has been stolen by a woman who never existed:

Yeah, it's extremely unhealthy. You have to make a lot of choices to get to this optional content of recontextualizations.

If Zach and Keisuke did have sex with Zach's coerced consent, Zach can respond in a hurt and stunned way:

Or a devastated way:

While also "joking" about what the fuck they're doing from here if Zach does in fact wind up pregnant:

Or even getting lost in a daydream about the scenario:

The flavor of this entire update changes a lot based on not only whether or not Zach is leaning into dissociative issues by how hurt Zach feels by Keisuke.

This is in response to Keisuke saying. "You could always stop being a wuss and just grab them (my shampoo and conditioner bottles) from me (instead of tossing them to you)." and Zach telling Keisuke. "You've got some fucking balls for asking me to do that after tonight." before Zach realizes Keisuke is worried that Zach would attack his crotch in his sleep requiring Zach to clearly state he doesn't want to be someone like his mom who makes chilling threats so casually:

Man, this update doesn't have particularly good one-image screenshots to explain the context of it.

Contrast that with Zach at his most hurt where he channels his mom's energy:

Besides what's been covered above, here's the current changelog of what I have put into the release:

• The fourth anniversary update can now be accessed from the title in the "Extras" screen, you can only get to this content if you've hit a placeholder screen at least once, there's a prompt to hide the start-of-game menu option to the extras screen, and you have a choice at the end of the anniversary content to decide if you want to treat the events in it as canon or not (or upon starting the game if you've already finished the anniversary content; this comes with the option to jump to the "debriefing" mentioned below and make a choice after).
• Made a few minor corrections in the fourth anniversary content, with a short bit of new writing that expands upon what I meant by "Schrödinger's canon."
• Polished up a lot of Author's Notes, be it adding expressions or cleaning up text to remove some references to a messed-up practice.
• Made the default Zoey outfit the fitted male school uniform as it's a bit jarring to see her naked at the title.
• I made Zoey a new pair of eyes (eyes_28) to compliment 26, 27, and 34 so she can narrow her eyes and look in all 4 diagonal directions, and it was just a duplicated of 26 anyways.
• Keisuke's sprites now have a wet layer, swim goggles, blushes on all poses, and a flaccid penis variant, meaning he can finally stop having the world's strongest overdose of Viagra.
• Fixed a bug with incorrect outfits upon loading saves.
• The phone text sounds are on a new audio channel to prevent them from canceling out other sounds.
• Fixed a bug for some users with a "maximum recursion depth reached" error message for one of Zoey's trembling animations.
• Fixed a few minor CG issues where layers would sometimes "double stack" and have thicker outlines than they should.
• One instance of Zoey's naked breasts slipping past the SFW filter has been fixed.
• The World Information screen now has a dedicated "Return to Navigation Screen" button while within the script as well as right click now doing that instead of putting you back in the game.
• Made a few GUI and quality of life improvements to the Android version as I now have a Pixel 8 and can use an actual phone to see where that version has issues. This includes many buttons now being easier to press, the text fitting a bit easier into the speaker textbox, the app icon working on Android 14 to not crop, and the Android splash screen being a bit better.
• Adjusted the "think" color from *#efefef (intended to be 93.75% gray, but due to a typo it was actually 99% gray) to #e7e7e7 (90.0625% gray) to make it more easily distinguished from italicized narration text.
• Unique fonts (like the yandere one) now show up in the history screen, and things like Author's Notes are removed from that screen if you turn the setting off after reading them.
• Fixed the quick menu text button outlines being too hard to read with a transparent background (it now adjusts to be thicker).
• Standardized the tags for font sizes and character display speed. It's boring stuff that excites me and no one else.
• A ton of typo corrections and minor fixes, far too many to list here. A paid editor helped a lot with Britney's Day 3 content and the existing mom route, but the entire script got passes.

I might be missing some minor things, but it's a very well-rounded update that is important.

So, the good news is that outside of checks from a paid editor and the writing using those polished HCGs to wrap up the scene, this update is done. The issue is writing those scenes...

If you didn't read that massive coming out post, I'm not only trans but stuck on HRT for a very complicated health reason. This is a problem as HRT affects my libido in ways that I am still not quite used to nearly a year into HRT.

For most trans women, HRT reigns in their sexual drive; for me, it has been the opposite. My libido doesn't "ebb and flow" so much as it goes from "'barely any' to 'too much'" with little in the way of gradients, and I have little control of the tap. I have been trying to line up my erotic writing for those brief periods where I can control my arousal and think through it rather than be drowned by it, but I think after sitting on my ass for about a week and a half as I've had close to zero passion for writing those sexual scenes and hesitated to get far into them due to lacking that enthusiastic drive (which is why I bothered to put that time into a long coming out post), I need to come up with an alternative plan.

To say it succinctly, sex is important to re:Dreamer. While it didn't end up the pornographic fodder I had initially anticipated due to the constraints of it no longer being acceptable to steal preexisting art and the  limited number of artists Espeon and I could commission who could match the art style of the game (which in turn transformed re:Dreamer from "a pornographic sex game" to "an adult game about a sex game, featuring pornography and sex"), sex is still a core plot point of this visual novel. The slightly-contrived plot structure requires Zach to have a lot of it, and Zach grows as a person through those intimate moments to a degree that it is fair to call them the focal points of this story.

Writing those focal points well is important not just to the story I want to tell but the story I think people want to read. I used to rely on my strong but well-understood male libido to tackle the challenges of writing something that is both sexy and emotional with strong character moments, but things are different now.

To say nothing of how I figured out I am bisexual (when I'm on this part of the hormonal cycle I have, I'd argue my attraction towards men is even stronger than it is toward women, and that's saying something no matter how brief that is), what I care about in pornographic content is different. Foreplay interests me and has its own allure rather than being a glossed-over buildup to the sex; the romantic passion, back-and-forth dialogue, and the powerful emotions from the whole spectrum of humans now matter just as much as the lustful passion, sexual attraction, and erotic descriptions (and even more when the mood strikes me); treating what happens in the bedroom as an extension of the public relationship gives so much depth to characters and is something I care surprisingly much about, and well-written aftercare makes my head get all fuzzy.

It's maybe a good thing that I'm so fucking fem-brained about this now given that the narration is from Zach's point of view and Zach is someone who is inevitably going to be fem-brained to a certain degree just from his changed anatomy and hormones (to say nothing of his ambiguous gender and realized bisexuality), but I wish it had happened a bit later in the story to better drive home how Zach does not approach the subject of eroticism the same way he used to. My issue might simply be that I am still trying to write these sex scenes from an erotic focus without the emotional and erotic focus, but there's only so much I can do to show that emotional connection between Zach and whoever he is fucking this early into the story as he hasn't yet worked past his own reservations or developed true emotional connections with his partner.

Nevertheless, after the coming out post and my last round of apartment tours on Thursday, I am going to get back into finishing this update by finishing the writing of those HCG scenes, not only because my libido is spiking again from the hormonal cycle I am on, but because I have to do this. I can absolutely guarantee you that I am not moving out until the update is published, but I need to be transparent that this type of writing is proving a lot more challenging for me in recent months than it used to be. The Britney topping scene wasn't this difficult to get through, so I have to conclude that there's also a bit of my own unexpected hesitation with writing heterosexual erotic content.

TiltSHIFT is finishing up those swimming pool HCGs with an estimated date of completion in less than a month. I had planned for the update immediately after this one to be diving in (ha!) with that writing, and I am excited to do it as it is a key moment of Zach realizing he is sexually attracted to Keisuke (even if he can still compartmentalize it), but I really might have to reevaluate my capabilities and my own hangups and redirect my focus toward Britney's route with the theater department meeting and the consequences of it (Zach might have gotten outed or let himself be outed). Britney has been long overdue for more content, and while I would have liked Keisuke to be in a more polished form as the trajectory I am taking the route from here, I gotta do what I can do.

I'll try not to leave this Patreon in the dark if something does come up with a delay between now and the release, and I do feel bad for not having that transparency until now.

Until next time, which is hopefully soon.