Corruption or not ?

As I browse the comments about Deviant Discoveries, I sometime come across one that like or dislike how one girl get corrupted.

And more often than not, I disagree.

… Not about their opinion about said “corruption” but as you may have guessed by the title and the quotes, about the fact they are corrupted at all.

Chrystal

Let’s start by the first.

Chrystal for me is the truly corrupted of the bunch.

She was probably going to be a reasonably successful and balanced person. Maybe heading toward some relationship issues, her naive side would clearly have lead her to suffer from assholes playing her.

Enters the MC. He manipulated her into doing things she would have never do by herself. Nurturing a side of her (exhibitionism) that would have never took off without his guidance.

But that is it, he only started it, and enjoyed the process she was undergoing.

I guess he also supported her when she was in doubt.
I think the most flagrant thing about her relationship with the MC is that she seem to be loyal without being tied to him or incomplete without his input.

And I think that being a depraved yet balanced (mentally so) person is the best example of corruption.

Kara

At the time she crossed the path the the MC Kara was already well settled in her life. Well she had some mishap with her ex-husband. But she certainly was an independent woman.

Some would without a doubt say she was a stuck-up bitch, well, it’s hard to deny it. But that is for a perfectly good reason. She had to play the hard-ass for her to be considered seriously. With her being a woman and having such a voluptuous body, it must have been extra hard for her to climb her way to her current position.

Even after being injected with some pink, she tried to control herself.

She arguably fell inside the MC’s hands, but she doesn’t depends on him. She certainly love their relationship. But unless her sex urges are too strong, she will stand her ground.

Yuki

Yuki situation is different, I won’t talk much about her background that will come in its own time.

But contrary to the previous two, Yuki didn’t started balanced. She had self-esteem and confidence issues. And on top of that she also was recently dumped by her boyfriend that exacerbate those issues.

She was doubly vulnerable.

Thanks to that the MC had no trouble coercing her as she offered no resistance when he tried to blackmailed her.

Once he forced her to be his “assistant”, he worked her weak side turning them into submission while showing her that he cared about her. That is a, if not the, substantial part of her transformation.

She let herself being crafted by the MC. Since he made her to his liking her confidence issues vanished : she couldn’t not suit him. He also gave her a persona to play so that she didn’t need to guess too much about how he wanted her to act.

But doing so he also made her totally dependent of himself. It’s hard to imagine at this state how she couldn’t end up damaged, or even dead, if he decided to reject her.

But one would be hard pressed to not see in her in her latest form someone truly happy.

In that sense I think you cannot talk about corruption, it’s a metamorphosis for sure, but there is no sense of waste in it. She just got fixed in a really naughty way.

Harley

Now the rising star of the bunch.

I may as the tradition ask write quite a bit more about her than about the others. So let’s get started.

Harley start as the most provocative of the girls, well the only one to be fair. I won’t serve you the classic “she hides behind her provocative attitude”, I do think it’s pretty much bullshit.

No really, Harley is just a misguided ready-to-be dropout. She doesn’t do well in the courses she attend, because she is simply not interested in those.

She is bored, and what better to pass time that to pick a fight with someone. Maybe create something, you know write shorts or things like that … 😀

But let’s get back to the theme of that post.

I’ll state it bluntly : Harley couldn’t be farther from corrupted.

From the start she was interested into S&M, and she already knew it. She was only shy about it as anyone would be if they were interested into something considered abnormal. And so even if the status of S&M is undeniably changing in the public opinion.

She even displayed her interest, in a camouflaged manner.

As far as their relationship is concerned, they are just enjoying each other’s company. I would even say, that Harley was aware of where they were heading exactly since their first encounter. If she certainly had her doubts at first, she certainly hoped for it.

And maybe because of that the MC injected her without her knowledge.

So let’s talk about her physical changes.

She doesn’t know why she underwent those, but she is liking them. The only impact they have on her is that she is now extra distracted.

So as I said I would ever qualify her as corrupted. I would qualified her as blossomed.

Conclusion

In the end, I would say, very little corruption going on.

There is certainly some moral issues raised, but it’s not like the MC care about them.

So what do you think about my take ? Have I made you change your mind ?

…And I’m back.

Hey guys!

Here’s to hoping it’s been a good week for you all.

Me, I just arrived back home this week and kind of had to settle back into the flow of things. Mostly concerning work and things around the house.

That didn’t stop me from using my spare time in the evening to continue working on the next update, which is coming along quite good I might add.

I’m not entirely sure if I had already mentioned that I reworked all of Lola’s content up to and including re-rendering all of her scenes, so playing through those should be a bit more rewarding and hopefully more thought out.

So then it’s on to finishing modelling the last of her new scenes before starting the rendering work.

I’ve still got some work to do before I’m thoroughly satisfied with the content so I’ll be sure to let you guys know. (Maybe I’ll even be posting a teaser if there’s interest in that.)

But really that’s all from me this time.

Thanks for being accepting of my week+ off work and your continued support.

Cheers
Jan.

Slow week

Hey, Vaasref here.

I just wanted to tell you that, like you, I’m waiting for Jan the Spider to return so that we can get back to work.

I have also finished to build my keyboard (and will need to write the post about it). It’s not perfect, it’s my first PCB design and my first keyboard build, so there is some issues here and there. But anyway I’m restored in my capacity to program.

I’m quite looking forward to start working again. I have planned some big gameplay changes. They are not for the next release though. As we learned from the SMS update, such addition in a Ren’Py game is quite work intensive.

Even if the game engine is starting to run cleaner and cleaner any substantial change means fighting again Ren’Py to make anything happen. That means bugs, the nasty kind, the kind that is unpredictable and hard to spot. So it’s stressful to release such update in a 1 month time period when a bug can suddenly appear and murder you with a rusty knife.

I’ll probably need to fully utilise git’s capabilities to work in parallel if one new features takes too much time. It’s nothing fancy but it’s a workflow I need to get used to.

With that, I’ll go back to my cave, bye.

(End of) Summer vacation

Hey guys!

I know I don’t talk a lot about my personal affairs here, but I thought it fair to let you wonderful people know that I’ll soon be going on a week+ long vacation, meaning there won’t be that much activity on the patreon page.

Don’t worry too much though, since progress for the next update is coming along nicely and my absence shouldn’t really be a problem for the development.

I have been super focused on this project lately and at times feeling a bit stressed about some aspects of it. 

So I guess what I’ve been needing is a change of pace and scenery. 

So even though this vacation is supposed to be all about rest and recuperation I have a feeling that once I get used used to not working my brain will fire up with all sorts of deviant ideas for the next installment.

But that’s pretty much all I have to say for now.

Until next time.
Jan.

Week 28-29 Report

Jan the Spider

So, I spent the last few days feeling pretty much under the weather, but I did manage to render the last batch of images for the upcoming update.

That’s 56 new images which will focus on Harley’s 3rd Tier.

This picture will be included in the update, so it’s kind of a foreshadowing as to what is going to happen…

Feel free to ponder it over, because I don’t want to spoil too much.

Now I’m just looking over the pics, fixing just the tiniest of flaws where I spot them and making sure everything looks right.

Then I’ll start writing down the dialogue, which to tell you the truth I usually just dread, before finally sitting down and banging most of it down in a few days.

I don’t want to set a date in stone just yet, I’ll tell you why:

It’s mainly because I hate to get you people excited and then having to postpone, but I promise you I have been working my ass off to be able to bring you the same kind of content that you’ve come to expect.

Hopefully I won’t have to make another post before you guys have the update.

Vaasref

As for myself I worked on setting up this devblog, installing what was obviously needed, tweaking the style to something I was satisfied with, it turned out quite better than anticipated really.

Anyway, I’m sure I’m not even started to tweak it as I’m sure that with time we will find that we lack a good deal of features. For example I might add a bbPress or something alike, I would like to have a better place for you to post bug reports and questions. There also might be some bugtracker plugin out there, I don’t know, didn’t checked yet, not really needed as there is no new gameplay feature plan short term, not until I have a decent keyboard to program on anyway, the handicap not having a good keyboard is the reason I started a series of posts about my process of making it (c.f. Project : Shining Armor).

Speaking of which I also continued working on it, I calculated as best as could the specs I needed for everything to work, finished the circuit schematics and started started the layout of the PCB. It’s coming along nicely but my computer was in a little bit of a blue error spree this week and the mobile phone network is quite spotty, so I was slowed down way too much for my liking.

Also being in holidays doesn’t help me to keep any sleep habit, so I’m only able to keep track of what I did more that 5h back. But I’m still able to know what part of the week it is.

It’s funny, I would say I have a almost decent absolute time frame while having a completely destroyed relative one.

But enough rambling for a single report, it’s kinda off topic really and I don’t want to belittle the work of Jan by telling too much of those poignant stories.

Personal project : Shining Armor – Part 1

First let’s shot the elephant in the room : it’s mostly off topic of this site.

Now that this is done, let’s talk about what it is.

So what is it ?

Simple, this is my project to build myself a mechanical keyboard from my dead MX Board 6.0.

Why is it dead in the first place ?

Good question myself. You see, it’s a quite common story involving sweat, hard work, and a not grounded soldering iron.

At first it should have been a “simple” change from MX red switches to MX white ones.

Years of membrane keyboards taught my fingers to try poke holes through them, and since I don’t see smashing keys hard as a negative I never tried to correct that. Needless to say that MX red are terribly too light for me (see I still said it for readers that are not into that kind of thing), even resting my finger on the keys when gaming was enough to activate them at time. That needed to stop.

So I ordered myself some Cherry MX white I could have gone for Kailh box navy, but since the keyboard is backlit I didn’t want even less light to be blocked.

In the same time ordered new keycaps, some double-shot PBT compatible with backlight, my layout (ISO FR), and with the keyboard that I found by some miracle on aliexpress. You see the old ones were quite badly worn out as you can see, the D and S caps are really carved, that was due to my nails being quite long since I randomly stopped biting them this year.

Original worn out laser-etched ABS keycaps

So, yeah, also changing the switches and the keycaps at the same time in my mind sounded like a nice metamorphosis (and we all appreciate a good metamorphosis here 😉).

I was in the process of moving so I kinda lost my soldering iron the the process so I ordered a TS100, that was definetly a good decision, that thing is awesome.

So once arrived I started desoldering those switches. I only had desoldering wick and a fluxpen that I found in my stuff and boy that was messy ! Took me something like 3h to remove 9 switches. By the time I called it a night, because it was dusk and I didn’t want mosquitoes to suck me dry, I was starting to refine my desoldering skills with the wick.

But the result were still so underwelming, that I ordered a desoldering pump.

Once it arrived I started again, and after around 2h I started having my hand with it, and I also installed some mosquito net on my window so I continued until morning (I’m a bit of a nigh owl) once every switches and their LED were removed (that mean desoldering around 440 points and removing around 110 LED and switches which is deceptively hard at first) I cleaned a little the PCB and started installing the new ones.

Everything was “smooth” (not really but let’s go with that) so far except some traces I ruined the first day but nothing too critical.

Once every new switches were installed I tested the board, some issues were present : some switches that I forgot to solder, and a couple resistors pad that were bridging (the MX Board 6.0 uses a exotic design based on resistance to read the key pressed), after fixing them everything except the backlighting was working.

Then the trouble started, I installed the LEDs, trying not to make mistakes in their polarities aware of the fact that they were in series.

I failed. Nothing lit up.

Without a multimeter (remember, moving) I pulled a LED and used it to try to troubleshot the issue. It never worked, I saw some LEDs I mounted the wrong way, and turned them but still nothing I didn’t even manage to find the source of the current for the backlighting.

Then I saw yet another LED mounted in the wrong way and by them I already stopped to unplug the keyboard to solder on it. That probably was the mistake that lead to the disaster.

Early when desolreding everything I noticed that when I was in contact to the ground of the board and that I was touching the LED terminals when soldering them some lit up probably due to me and my iron not being grounded allowing a little AC to flow from the PWM of the soldering iron and my capacitive mass. That would be my guess anyway.

So when I was trying yet another time to fix the backlight my computer started going crazy, and the keyboard test software running told me that indeed I messed my keyboard PCB.

I think that due to the nature of the key reading the PCB was quite rugged, I must have shorted pretty much everything without causing any issue, that is why I think that it must be the soldering iron background AC that caused it. And by that I mean my mistake to solder while keeping the board plugged and my decision based on laziness to not bother grounding it.

So what then ?

After that I looked at the board annoyed by my stupidity, tried to look how it was made, on the logic side.

The issue is that the keyboard now spat inputs every milliseconds (as advertised that resistance based tech does work after all). My guess was that I either bridged the PWM of the backlight with the logic side or that I fried a component between the microcontroller and the keys, after checking for bridges, I sided with the fried something hypothesis.

The logic board being crammed in the space above the nav’ cluster arrows, I looked at the ICs, but nothing visible, so I now had a choice to make.

Buying blindly some replacement hoping that it was not a passive or part of the microcontroller that got fried (part because it was still working as a keyboard, a mad one, but a keyboard) in those cases I wasn’t skilled enough to fix it, swapping the other ICs would have already be hard enough due to their size and my lack of equipment to do reflow properly.

The other was to give up.

I was leaning to giving up when an idea stroke me.

Why not double down of the customization ?

Entering the “Shining Armor”

After frying the logic board I was now left with : my regrets, a useless PCB, a bunch new and old all functioning switches, a metal mounting plate, a cast alloy casing (supposed to be aluminium but still ferromagnetic) and a plastic backplate with still unbroken flipping feets (quite the feat since I broke them on all my previous keyboards, probably because of my hammer fingers).

That keyboard was built like a tank, if I would not shot at it with AP AC shells it would still be working.

Given the price of it and the fact that it was in fine only part of what made it a good keyboard that was destroyed I figured : why not just replace the PCB ?

I tried to look for a donor keyboard but since the model was considered overpriced at the time and not sold anymore. My quick search were in vain. But when looking at some specialized forum I read a topic about a drop-in replacement for an other Cherry keyboard, and I though : “hey that is not a bad idea”. I looked for a replacement for my keyboard, nothing, quite unsurprisingly for this quite unpopular design.

Then I found a tutorial about making you own design, and since I’m quite the type to learn how to do stuff I chose to go for it and make myself a custom drop-in replacement for my as-good-as-dead PCB.

By then I decided that the customization was heavy enough to justify the status of named project.

I chose “Shining Armor” because of the MX White switches. I figured that with all the metal and the white switches and the backlight, the theme of the “white knight in shining armor” does match, doesn’t it ? I mean it matches at least 4 words out of 5. But the name was too lengthy and the “white knight” part was already connoted on the internet so I kept the “shining armor” part. And I don’t mind naming it like a pony which is a prince consort in a matriarcal society.

Hum, kinda loop back to a SJW subject when you think about it …

Anyway I still think it’s a cool and adequate name.

My goals with the design

First I want to retain most of the features of the keyboard, that means.

  • Keeping the plain colored backlight, maybe a smidge more fancy as long as it’s light on the programming and electronic side
  • Keeping N-Key Roll Over, since it was that made me buy a new keyboard in the first place, I want to be able to roll my head on the keyboard and still have perfect inputs
  • Keeping the same footprint, including the use of the backplate (kinda forced by the fact that I have switches for plate mounting anyway)
  • Keeping the same dual color LEDs for toggleable button like num, caps and scroll locks

I will also try to :

  • Keep the number of active components low while I don’t care about passives
  • Use through holes components where I can since I’m not equipped for SMD
  • Use 2 layer PCB, 4 layer could be easier to design but kinda overkill and pricier

However I must say that because my goal is use as few active components as possible it means I must use the microcontroller I/O efficiently so the matrix has to remain efficient too : I have around 25 I/Os and an optimal conventional matrix of 11 by 10 takes 21 I/Os, that can make routing quite tricky at time