Happy #InternationalWomensDay from the Connection Pending Team!
Here at Pixel Pineberry we want to celebrate our diversities and keep making games with wonderful, genuine women. Butch, trans, ace, plus size or petite--we want Connection Pending showcase all these qualities of our ladies and more in a positive light, and remind our players to love women of all different shapes and sizes, ethnicities, and sexualities! We cannot thank everyone enough for the support shown for our girls so far, and we hope we can use that support to continue making positive representation of women in the future.
Hey guys! We’ve been quiet since 2017 rolled around, but there’s no need to worry; during the time we’ve been dormant, our game had gotten some major features developed just in time for Valentine’s! Our demo’s script is about halfway done, and there’s only a few more things left the art team needs to deliver. From here on out the focus will be to start tying things together and fleshing things out as we use this month to finish up our demo!
First off, we have a new “log in” screen which allows you to set a custom name and screen name for yourself. Of course, if you don’t feel like inserting a custom name, Andrea’s default name and user will be kept throughout the game.
The biggest developments we have made throughout January is major improvements for our representation of “Eosos Online”, the MMO that our girls play together within the story. Alongside improvements to our Eosos Sprites and their placements, our programmer has wow’d us away with dynamic cutscenes that really immerse the player and feel like they’re engaging in an MMO!
The battles will be scripted, but you will still be able to have access to dialogue options and have opportunities to engage with the girls vocally.
Our Secondary artist DoodleCraftie is in charge of the Eosos Avatars for each of the girls. Here’s some concepts for Sophia’s lovely pink Avatar!
Aside from being able to see the girls in the Amity Chatroom and Eosos Online, the player will get to peek into the daily lives of the girls offline, and omnipotently see how the girls behave when they’re by themselves. This will allow the player to see the differences between someone’s behavior when online with their friends, and when they’re alone in their room.
Here’s a little look into one of Val’s offline monologues in our Omnipotent VN mode. Backgrounds that move with your mouse, as well as changes in the sprite’s proximity to the player, all help to make the game feel less static.
In the next month we’ll be working hard on fixing bugs, finishing art assets, implementing GUI, and editing script to bring you guys our demo! Everyone on the team is ecstatic about how far the game has come since its early stages, and we can’t wait to share more of our hard work in our next dev update!
Until then, Happy Valentine’s! Stay thirsty, stay gay for cute girls.
- CP Dev Team
This looks super adorable I love all the characters! And I relate to Sophia a lot already ;_; Seriously it's kind of hard to find a GxG VN so good ;; thank you so much for all your work!! Keep up the great work! Definitely looking forward to this ;A;
Ah thank you for your kind words!! <3 It warms my heart to hear that you relate to Sophia a lot already. She is a character who is very near and dear to the creator of the project and to myself. ;__; It certainly can be difficult to find GxG VNs sometimes, but they’re out there! My personal, recent favorite is Butterfly Soup and I highly recommend it if you haven’t played it!
You’re welcome, but more importantly thank you for being interested! We’ll do our best to provide a great and cute experience!
Hello hello! Is this project still being developed, might I ask?
Hello hello to you too!
This project is indeed still being developed! Collectively the team has been experiencing a lot of personal hardships including the creator who has passed management of the project on to another member of the team (that’s me! The one typing to you right now! :D ) in the meantime while things stabilize for them.
However through this we are taking our time and reorganizing things, updating art assets, and reviewing the scripts and story thus far, making changes where necessary so that we may proceed comfortably.
We hope to have some rad sneak peaks for you all in the coming months! We’re all excited to show you all, however we want to polish things before we do!
As our devs continue to work harder, the end of the year slowly gets closer and closer. 2016 hasn’t been the best year for most of us, but we are determined to end this year with a bang of positivity! Each week as our game slowly comes together, our confidence grows! And we’re happy to share some of those updates with you!
Our first great news is that we have a new logo! Our lead artist Whit bought the rights and redid it in order to have a more refined logo that better fit the feel of the game.
Aside from that, we’ve had a lot of new visual developments in our sprite and background department. Our budget is small, but we are determined to make the most of it. We’ve purchased a few bundles of pre-made VN backgrounds courtesy of Minikle. We then had our lead artist Whit edit and paintover the stocks from Minikle to create custom backgrounds for the game that would fit our characters better.
Currently we have 4 completed scenes, 1 for each of our NPCs (shown above are the bedrooms for Minnie, Rylee, Val, and Sophia respectively), with each background having 2 variations for Day and Night.
Speaking of our NPCs, we have completed the sprites for our girls! Currently each girl will have 2 different sprites: one portrait for what we call “Eosos Mode”, and one full body for “Visual Novel Mode”.
Our MC however will have 2 half body sprites for these modes instead. Having 2 separate set of sprites was a lot of extra work for our artists, but we felt they really added to the visuals of the game overall.
All in all, we really believe that the art in the game will be visually stimulating and draw our players in. Next update, we'll hopefully be showing off more of the programming and GUI, as well as some developments on the sound front! This will probably be our last dev update until the new year, so the dev team will catch everyone on the flip side!
Have you heard the buzz? The Queen Bee of gaming is in town and her name is Valora Hachimitsu! She’s as sweet as a honeycomb, but not afraid to be as fierce as a Yellow Jacket if you get on her bad side.
Name: Valora Hachimitsu
Age: 19
Gender: Female (Trans Woman)
Ethnicity: Japanese-Mexican
Location: East Los Angeles, CA
Job: Professional Gamer & Streamer
Habits: Insomnia, always using hands, easily influenced by Sophia, tends to geek out over really cute things
Hobbies: gaming, puns, anime, con going, cosplay, celebrating her heritages
Ambitions: join a pro esports team and get sponsored, being who she wants to be
Frustrations: Derogatory comments, harassment, being referred as dude or similar things, badly designed video games
Valora is one of the romantic interests you can pursue within Connection Pending’s story. Val puts on a confident, cheesy, almost queen bee-esque persona when in game and on stage, which has a tendency to intimidate people and push them away. This front is her shield that she uses as she reaches for her dreams. But who is Val under this sturdy honeycomb of an exterior? A kind, gentle, fluffy, and shy little bumblebee, maybee!
Just like the other girls of the game, you start to learn about Val more intimately. Her life, her past, her dreams, and her struggles are all slowly revealed during the course of her route. You will have the chance to not only observe, but help her through her struggles as a professional gamer, with her insecurities of who she is as a woman, and with who she wants to be or how she thinks others want her to be. You will help her as a friend, or maybe even as a lover.
While playing Connection Pending, you can earn your way towards Val’s route by building up positive Karma points through your interactions with her. This hard worker bee struggles to open up because of her focus on her career, and tends to be rather shy and guarded otherwise. So it will be your goal to brave this hornet’s nest to find her incredibly sweet center and help her find out who she is as an individual.
