Happy New Year 2025!
Hello, friends!
Well, 2024 has come to an end. Once again, let me express my deepest gratitude to all of you for supporting me. Thanks to your support, despite all the darkness going on in the world, this year has turned out pretty well for Liza, for Riley, and for me right along with them.
New Skills
Over the past year, I’ve gained more experience in 3D graphics and feel much more confident in many areas I never used to think about at all. For instance, I’ve developed a technique for transferring animated deformations.
I’ve also come up with a method for creating looped animations for dForce objects. I won’t go into too much detail, so just have a look at the kimono: making it move seamlessly wasn’t trivial. But now that it’s done, I know how to do similar things quickly.
I’ve picked up a lot of new skills in creating more realistic wet areas on characters’ skin and clothing.
I’ve created a new tool for working with geometry that significantly speeds up my workflow in DAZ Studio. On top of that, I’ve gained a lot of programming experience in Ren’Py, which has helped me improve my games’ code and fix a bunch of bugs.
Quite importantly, I’ve also honed my AI skills. Mostly, I work with ChatGPT, and when it drives me nuts with its limitations, I switch to Gab AI. ChatGPT also helped me create a utility that generates webm videos from a sequence of images in a chosen folder. It supports multithreading and a task queue. I put it together in about an hour, even though I don’t have the slightest idea how the code actually works under the hood. That’s also how I used AI for a better translation of my games.
New Computer and My Own Workspace
In August, I finally upgraded my slightly outdated PC. I was among the first people to buy an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. My new build has 128 GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 with liquid cooling, all inside a Lian Li Dynamic EVO XL case.
Plus, I recently moved, and now I have my own office. It may be small, but it’s much more convenient and makes work so much easier.
The Better Deal
Probably the main achievement of this year is my game The Better Deal on Steam! After last year’s setback with the ban of Beauty and the Thug, this accomplishment feels even more valuable. I’d also like to congratulate Nev once again—he wrote the game’s scenario and also served as the main playtester. Unfortunately, Nev lives in a country where The Better Deal on Steam is blocked by some idiotic laws, so he can’t even log in and leave a comment.
Adding a bit of a downer, though, is the fact that The Better Deal wasn’t approved for Early Access, so I had to release the current version as “Part 1.” Because of that, players see it as a full version but complain it’s too short, which hurts ratings and, of course, sales. I get where they’re coming from. They see me as that greedy guy who wants to earn more by splitting his game into several parts. Still, every curator so far has rated it positively and recommended it. Right now, the overall reviews are Mostly Positive (and English-speaking audiences label it as Positive).
Beauty and the Thug
If it weren’t for The Better Deal, the biggest news would be the game overhaul of Beauty and the Thug. Because of that, the new update took a lot longer to finish than I wanted, but I think the result is definitely worth it.
The game now features clearly labeled new content, an in-game hint system, over fifty nice and hot animated menus, an achievement system, a better gallery, and many other updates.
Plans for 2025
I’m already working on the next update for The Better Deal. I plan to split the development into two parts. The first half will be published on Patreon, Subscribestar, itch.io, and elsewhere. The second half (the game’s finale) will also be released on Steam (hopefully!). I’ve already finished two events in the new section of The Better Deal. In fact, as I’m writing this, my graphics card is busy rendering the next animation. I’ll be ready to share my first progress report of the year very soon.
After I release the first part, I’ll continue working on Beauty and the Thug. It’s a shame that so many of you don’t want to give Hunter a second chance, ha! But oh well—next update, I’ll add more scenes with Amy, the pizza boy and the pizza girl, other characters, fetish progress, and so on. And I’m saving the next key event (important for both Hunter and Amy routes) for later.
Final words
Once again, let me wish all of you a Happy New Year! A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the game’s development—translators, proofreaders, everyone who reported bugs and helped me fix them.
I’m glad to say our community is growing. This year, my rank on Graphtreon climbed from 944 into the top 500 (459 at the time of writing) among NSFW creators. The number of Subscribestar subscribers has roughly doubled, and Beauty and the Thug has been a pretty regular presence in the top 20 paid NSFW games with a female protagonist on itch.io, where it’s approaching 2,000 followers. And those folks are of all ages (obviously 18+). One player who reached out to me turned 79 recently. Of course, health isn’t always the greatest at that age, but I’m truly touched that someone at such a venerable stage of life still finds my games genuinely interesting. Styl, Happy New Year! And thank you for adding me to your list of “good people”!
Happy New Year, everyone, and thank you for all your support! Let’s make 2025 even better!
Get The Better Deal
The Better Deal
A story-focused, highly animated visual novel with several love interests, straight or pure lesbian.
Status | In development |
Author | zegamez |
Genre | Visual Novel, Adventure |
Tags | Adult, Animation, Comedy, Erotic, Female Protagonist, Lesbian, Ren'Py, storygame, Story Rich |
Languages | German, English, Spanish; Castilian, Spanish; Latin America, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese (Simplified) |
More posts
- Fixed a small bug with the last Brazilian Portuguese translation98 days ago
- The Better Deal Updated to 0.5cAug 05, 2024
- The Better Deal Updated to 0.5bAug 02, 2024
- The Better Deal 0.5a is launched!Jun 15, 2024
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Sounds awesome. Can't wait for the next step and finale
Do I need to be connected to Steam to play the second half of The Better Deal (the game's finale)?
No, I will publish it here as well but as the whole game without splitting into two parts. If you have already purchased the current version of The Better Deal, the whole game will be for free for you.