BMO TV – v0.5.1 Progress Report

Hey everyone,
it’s the beginning of the next month and I’m so thankful for all of you who are still here once again. We have a record-breaking month behind us and I’m so grateful. I was expecting to never reach these amounts of income, so the stretch goals that we’re seeing right now were jokes at some point, but I guess I have to refresh my multiplayer coding memory, since I promised to introduce a versus mode if we reach 11k. I never though that was possible, but we’re not that far off now. Still don’t expect to reach it though. I’m just dumbfounded, I guess. I did hire new freelancers to do stuff, so I promise the money is still put to good use.

Anyways… it’s time to give you an overview of what’s to come in v0.5.1! The next patch has the catchy title “Le fabuleux destin d’Amelie la bonne”, which should translate to “The fabulous life of amelie the maid”… hopefully. 😉
I did actually have six years of french in school, but it’s been 15 years since then, so I’m very rusty. Let’s dive into the feature list.

1. The first Katelyn branch

Always wanted to become a sexy maid? Well, now is the perfect time. With the conclusion of the Katelyn maid quest from v0.5.0 we have the opportunity to start her first tf branch, and it is for the french maid.
This comes with a whole new branch of fun transformation time, reaching from maid to french things. Of course, a racial transformation can’t occur without a bit of a language loss, so get ready for a silly french accent.

Shoutout for this goes to a website called PAYNEful (https://www.payneful.co.uk/projects/french-accent-translator/), which has a silly french javascript generator, that I looked at for inspiration, although when I programmed it myself I took it way further as you can maybe see in the GIF above. No disrespect to the French meant though. I hope you can get a laugh out of it. There are no jokes about eating frog legs, I promise!

2. New clothing category: Legwear

I think a huge part of BMO’s appeal is the ability to self-express yourself in so many ways. Whenever I get a save by somebody else sent to me, I’m always astonished how different their characters look. So I think adding more ways to express yourself are never a waste of money. This month, we’re adding all kinds of awesome legwear. Tights, Socks, and Overknees in all sorts of colors can now be found in the clothing shop. I think they make an awesome addition. We’re getting closer to the time when we can hold transmog competitions on Discord. 😉

3. Marco Content

It was promised to you for v0.5.0 and it had to be scrapped both because of my covid infection, as well as the artist not sending all the art, but now I really do have all the graphics I need in order to introduce Marco to the house. He’ll be taking over the gym a bit, and there will be several dialogs with him, although some of it will be added over time.

4. New Hallways

Finally, all room art was replaced in the last patch and we can now introduce new rooms! It’s only the upper hallways for now, but there will be more soon. These are the connections to all the other contestant’s bedrooms, as well as your own, of course. The door in the vending machine room, that previously led to the bedroom, will be repurposed soon as well. You’ll hopefully see that in the next update already. 

5. Room Standing positions

Maybe when looking at the new hallway GIF you already realized that something is different. With this update, I’m trying out new main character poses. Previously, it always took the right side of the screen, but maybe it feels better to always put your character directly into the scene, so that it looks like it’s part of it. It’s only experimental for now, but we’ll see how it works. I’m leaving the option to reverse this open for now, but at first glance it does feel better to me.

6. Himari in the Kitchen 

While we are ready to introduce new rooms, the contestant’s graphics still haven’t all been replaced. This month we’re getting new Himari graphics for the kitchen. I wish we’d get this done faster, but it is what it is. More money won’t help if the artist only has a certain amount of time each month. This is already our second artist, and finding more people to imitate the artstyle did prove difficult the last time already, so we’ll just have to be a bit patient with this one.

7. CPU optimization

Last, but not least, I did get some reports of the game slowing down in v0.5.0 and I found several things that weren’t optimal, that I fixed. Hopefully, that’ll already reduce the problems some people reported a lot, but if not, I’ll keep looking into it during the Alpha phase. 

So… there it is. What do you think? Are you looking forward to the next patch? Much of the programming is done, but there’s still a ton of dialog writing to go. That is the expected time schedule though, so I’m totally on track for the Alpha release in about two weeks. As always, if you want more progress reports, join the Discord for a lot more smaller news bites.

Again, thank you so much for supporting me and my work. I promise to keep giving it my best shot.

See you in two weeks,
Rel

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