Hi everyone!

It's me, Paradox, one of the many developers at Andrealphus Games, and today I've been asked to write a bit about my experience working on TruLove.

Our marketing manager made it clear to me that this was not a punishment when I turned to him in panic and hesitantly said "Of course, I can do it... "
So here I am, in front of my computer at 4:20 a.m., a time that doesn’t indicate any stress on my part at having to write this. As we speak, I’m looking for the next words that I will type on my mechanical keyboard, which makes sleep of any kind impossible for anyone in the same room as me.

Luckily, I don't have to think too much about what I'm gonna talk to you about because, as this lame introduction shows, I needed someone to prompt me with a few questions to answer in order for me to tell you about the game from a devs' point of view.

What was your design process for certain elements of the game?

This is a complicated question given that TruLove was a project that had been started before the arrival of the current development team. The project was on hold until Nico and I took it over, but a lot of choices in terms of design, game mechanics, visual atmosphere, and other aspects concerning the game’s design had already been thought out and, for the most part, implemented.

Our first job was to examine the code and review the design of the game in order to figure out what we liked and what needed to be changed. We took a lot of inspiration from other Andrealphus Games’ projects when creating TruLove. In it, you will find game mechanics from Love & Sex: Second Base and Leap of Love (minus the countless deaths) that have been slightly modified in order to offer a fresh gaming experience.

What new features, mechanics, etc. were you hoping to implement that differ from previous titles?

So, as mentioned before, TruLove uses mechanics from our other games. Like Leap of Love or Love & Sex, the player will have to manage a daily schedule. The main difference is that instead of choosing where the character will go, the player will choose an activity that the main character will have to do during a given period of time. The goal here is to offer something simpler than Leap of Love, which requires a lot of time to be invested in learning the game due to its complexity. It will also be simpler than Love & Sex which also requires a lot of time in the game due to the amount of content and possible paths it contains.

The main way that TruLove stands out from our other games is that we have chosen to change the way the main character develops his relationship with the girls. You must first go through a phase of Seduction, where you have the opportunity to learn each girl’s personality. After this phase, you will be put on the path of Love or Kink depending on the choices you made during seduction. Therefore, It is up to the player to organize the main character’s time well to increase his stats, spend time with the girls, become intimate with them, and fit it all in before the end of the school year!

What challenges in development did you overcome?

There were a lot of challenges to deal with during TruLove’s development. To be precise I would even say too many, as it’s kinda unlikely to have a flawless run during game development, even though my preference is to run into no issues at all!

In TruLove, it was not implementing game mechanics, the relationships between characters, and most of the visible aspects of the game that were complex. TruLove is easy to understand, simple to play, and, as a result, simple to code. The real challenge during development was to create methods that make the integration of the various assets, and the way they are used, easy for us. That, and the art gallery, but I won't talk about that today…

Let’s take animations, for example! The process to for animation is fairly straightforward:
- First, you need a 2D artist who will make a CG, short for Computer Graphic. This is an image of a scene that takes up the whole screen and is not just a background
- Then, you need an animator who will take the CG, put in animation software (in our case Live2D), do their magic with it, and export it to a bunch of files that will be used in the game. I won’t go into further detail as the rest is fairly complicated.
- Finally, you need a developer who will take the files, determine what they are used for, how those files interact with each others, and what lines of code are needed to use them in the game (the only one of the three parts that gives me a paycheck)

Our main goal was to create a method that would fetch the files from the right place, differentiate them, and regroup them in order to automatically create a usable version of the animation when needed. In addition, we had to create a method that would automatically switch between an animated CG, and a static one depending on what the situation requires.
A lot of the visual assets (sprites, background, foreground, etc.) required adjustments, code refactoring, and other twists and turns which proved to be tedious enough to be a major challenge in development we overcame!

Is there anything that you're really excited for people to experience?

Like any game of this type, TruLove’s best experiences are its story and its characters. By keeping the gameplay simple, we hope that players will be able to focus more on enjoying the story and the different characters. As developers, we also hope to have as few bugs as possible once the game is finally available to the public :p