Amai Progress Report and House Preview (Patreon)

The latest feature that I've added to the game is the ability to walk around the protagonist's house! You can read all about it - and watch a video about it - in my most recent blog post.

But - although I am extremely grateful to the volunteer who modeled the house for me - I feel that the visual quality of the environment could be improved in a lot of ways. Recently, a 3D artist has been re-modeling the Aishi residence at a much higher level of quality! I'm thrilled with the work he has shown me so far, so I've shared a preview of it with you above!

But, of course, I'm sure that what you're really interested in is the status of Amai. I have a short, but meaningful update for you:

Amai Progress Report

On April 1st, I felt as though there was a very real possibility that Amai could actually be finished by April 15th. In fact, I almost made the decision to announce April 15th as Amai's release date! However, I'm very glad that I didn't do that:

Over the past 2 weeks, I encountered a tremendous number of "Oops! I almost forgot about that!" tasks; tasks that had completely slipped my mind. Stuff like...

• Writing the text that appears inside of Amai's diary

• Changing the comments that appear when gossiping about Amai online

• Updating the "dating sim" minigame so that it would be compatible with any rival rather than being hard-coded for Osana specifically

• Getting the game to recognize that Amai shouldn't speak with Shoku's voice lines when the player is talking to Amai about the Cooking Club

• Just a whole bunch of different miscellaneous stuff, such as replacing some old crummy placeholder animations with newer and better ones, et cetera

These tasks are not difficult or time-consuming; they're just very plentiful. They kept on piling up, and actually ate up most of the past two weeks!

However, at this point in time, there are basically 5 or 6 super-easy tasks remaining, and then Amai is straight-up DONE. The only remaining thing that might take up a significant amount of time is implementing the cutscene where Kizana meets Senpai, but, honestly, aside from that, there is barely any work left whatsoever.

So, with all of that in mind, there's a part of me that wants to shout from the mountaintops, "May 1st!! She's coming out on May 1st!!" ...but, there's one thing holding me back from doing so:

I really, really want each week of Ayano's story mode to be fully voiced. I feel that, without voice acting, Ayano's mode wouldn't be significantly different from 1980s Mode. Over the past 4 months, a lot of people have contacted me and volunteered to voice act for the game, but very few of them had actual acting ability, or professional-quality recording equipment. I'm grateful to everyone who contacted me and offered to help, but the simple fact of the matter is that almost none of the people who applied as voice actors over the past 4 months were able to meet the standards of quality that were established by the game's original voice actors.

It's become clear that, if I want Amai's week to be voiced, I'll have to put out a casting call and hire some actual professionals. Over the next 2 weeks, while I mop up the last remaining Amai tasks, I'm going to put forth an effort to find professional voice actors who would be willing to lend me their voices for the right price. There are two likely outcomes:

1) I won't find anyone who is a perfect match for Ayano/Taro/Amai/Suitor over the next 2 weeks; the search will take much longer than that. I wouldn't be willing to delay Amai indefinitely while searching for new voice actors, so I'd just release Amai on May 1st.

2) Over the next 2 weeks, I'll find a cast of actors who are absolutely perfect for the job, and I'll be so excited about the prospect of making Amai's week fully voiced that I will postpone her release until all voice acting is wrapped up and each of her events has been given unique animations.

Currently, I feel that the most likely outcome is that Amai will be released on May 1st. We'll just have to see.