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Update for December (CaptainCaption's Been Sick)
🕑 Added 2019-12-15 00:48:09 +0000 UTCHey everyone. It’s been almost 2 weeks without an update, but you all deserve to know what’s going on.
Last Sunday (December 8) was an unproductive day for re:Dreamer. I live at home still and my parents had been gone for 3 weeks celebrating their 30th anniversary with a vacation in New Zealand and Australia, so the entire day was spent cleaning up the various household messes so they wouldn’t freak and then driving to and from the airport to get them. I made the decision to delay by a day since the release quite frankly wasn’t ready. That was my error from not focusing my efforts better.
The next morning, I woke up sick as a dog. I had nausea, a headache, a slight fever, a stomachache, and no energy. My parents had brought back a virus linked to stomach flu with them from Australia (where it is apparently running rampant).
The past week has been spent trying to recover from the virus. I’ve been taking medicine my doctor gave me to help with my nausea, but I’ve still spent the vast majority of the day lying in bed on my phone with no energy and no appetite. A few times I’ve gotten up to my computer to do something else for a bit to stave off the cabin fever, but it’s been for 2 hours at most each time.
All meals I’ve tried to eat have been thrown up leaving me on a diet of nothing but Gatorade and high carb snacks (mostly bananas, applesauce, and rice). This morning I felt a little better, so I took my chances and tried to eat a bowl of cereal. I spent until noon throwing it back up.
6 days have passed since my symptoms began to show and I honestly can’t say that I’m recovering quickly. My fever has abated but that’s the only thing that’s notably improved. As per my doctor’s orders, I’ve been trying to just take it easy and rest while on a very light diet mostly focused on fluids and electrolytes. Websites aren’t in agreement over the time it takes for the disease to resolve, but the range is from 2 days to 2 weeks.
When I’ve had the energy, I’ve been tapping away at an update, but the next step in the story for re:Dreamer is complicated. I’m not running on all cylinders at the moment so I wouldn’t feel confident with a release without a thorough check on everything, which I can’t do while sick.
There’s a lot to do for 0.1.12 and the changes are so thorough that I’m not sure if it should be called that or 0.2.0. I’ll try to give an outline of what’s in store, though you should keep in mind certain details need to be finalized with Espeon before being confirmed.
The big this is that the core mechanics of the re:Dreamer app require a rework. Esp and I brainstormed a bit last week and we came to the conclusion that in the existing framework of the pseudo-battle royale game there’s next to no margin for error for Zach/Zoey to move around without triggering a bad ending of some sort. Thankfully, we haven’t gone past the first day of transformation in the story yet, but the changes are still going to be deep.
The goal had been for Zach/Zoey to accumulate enough tokens to afford an item in the in-game shop that would let them reverse their player edits, but that’s no longer on the table. You still accumulate tokens (or rather, points) by performing sexual acts, but the plan is for the app to function over a 6 month “season” of playtime with one overall grand winner based on accrued points. I’ll get into details about the winner’s prize in a bit, but let’s move on to the core mechanics.
Again, the specifics are being ironed out still, but the core daily and bounty are being combined into “quests” of roughly the same objectives (aka complicated and specific sexual exploits). These quests will change throughout the day. New ones are added, some are taken off the list, and other might even have their details altered or obscured. They’re broken off into tiers based on perceived difficulty/risk or certain modifiers (like accepting a quest without knowing the precise details for bonus points). Like the Daily Tasks, one must be completed each day or the re:Dreamer app will uninstall, but a benign option is almost always available; however, choosing the safe route over and over again isn’t a good way for Zach/Zoey to win the game (plus, it’s not what the readers are here for).
So the players have these quests to complete, there’s no limit on how much you can do in one day. There are also certain activities that will always gain you points (sex, masturbation, and other acts). Expanding on this thread, there’s the option for Zach/Zoey to just engage in a prolonged gangbang for points in an emergency.
If you haven’t read it, Tetsuna’s adult gender bender manga An App That Turns You into a Girl is a loose framework for how we intend for these points to be gained.
In the game script of the new tutorial, Ai outlines three levels of rewards based on the level of “desire” they fulfill.
- Dreams are trivial whimsical fancies of a fleeting nature. They're erratic and unpredictable, and they vanish almost as soon as they appear. They are all things that are possible, if not a bit strange or cumbersome to do. A good example would be a sudden desire to go for a walk when waking up in the middle of the night that you rationalize away by thinking about how long it would take to get dressed.
- Fantasies are the next step up. These desires have a stronger impact and a vivid mental image you can get lost in, but they're held back from being achieved due to their fantastic nature. They're weirder than dreams as well. Fetishes are a common example, as are unrealistic life goals. The important thing is that these are vague and sprawling desires built without any foundations to make them real.
- Wishes are the big desires that you'd either need your whole life or a divine miracle to reach. They can be without scope or limit, but they're usually a single concrete desire, like finding a cache of enormous wealth.
Wrapping back around to the game objective I mentioned earlier of getting the most points, the winner will be granted a single wish without constraints.
Based on Zach/Zoey’s earlier dialogue, you might have guessed that they might feel a moral obligation of sorts to prevent sexual deviants from accessing a world-changing wish. That (combined with their variable desire to win and use their wish to turn back into a man) is the planned motivation.
Once again, this isn’t an insanely complicated set of changes to implement, but they will require finesse and careful thought, which is why I’m not going to attempt to fully implement any of them until I recover.
In other development news, we’ve still been reaching out to artists. One new artist Espeon and I have contacted is NO1. You can check out their pixiv gallery here: pixiv
We like their work quite a bit. While they don’t specialize in TSF/女体化 stuff, they have worked on visual novel sprites in the past and have said they could be available as a full-time artist. We were about to seal the deal on a sort of “test run” of Zach/Zoey sprites and expressions for 10k yen or so they could finish before Comiket 97, but me getting sick threw a big wrench into those plans.
As for the other artists, we’ve been talking to the previously mentioned ones. Skeb has also been great for finding artists who are both familiar with TSF/女体化 stuff and open to commissions.
Just the typical feminization tag used in JP media turns up 148 creators!
tl;dr I'm sick as a dog and the next update is delayed because it requires me to be able to focus, which I can't do while sick. Please bear with us as I recover!
