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I like the look of this. Looking forward to seeing how it turns out. 

Hey, everyone, I just posted a demo of the game where you can play the intro sequence. It's just a demo so there are very few features yet included, but it'll give you a taste of what to expect from the full game. 

Thank you both for your comments! I really love the visual design, too, especially Raven's. 

God, I love women in hats.

Apologies for the radio silence! I was meaning to do week 3's update on Sunday but some real life matters got in the way. Anyway, blankd has agreed to share these images of our major characters, so now you can get a better idea of the game's look and feel. 

First, Lavinia, our game's socially anxious but brilliant protagonist: 

Next, the three different models of robot girlfriend. As I've mentioned, in any playthrough you'll be able to build just one of these three models: 

Blueberry (a.k.a. Blue, BB) is gentle, cheerful and supportive. 

Georgiana is clever, curious and challenging. 

Raven is enigmatic and aloof. 

Would love to hear your thoughts on the characters, now you've seen their visual design. 

Update for the end of week 2: 

• Programming is progressing nicely, now we have a progress journal and a character journal. 
• Story has gone into writing stages, with both writers now working on the prologue section. 
• We're looking at nine character sprites at this point, of which four have finished line art. 

All in all not bad for two weeks' work.

Oh, hey! A reply. 

I'll let blankd know about the art, we can decide at what stage we want to start sharing it. 

Girlfriend Material is the story of Lavinia von Adeline, an eccentric and socially anxious inventor who decides to rescue her love-life by building herself a robot girlfriend. The game is being written in Ren'py and is primarily a visual novel, with a time management and stat building component that controls the process of building the robot itself. 

I'm Hazel, I'm the lead writer and programmer, and this is my first time managing a project like this. Our sprite artist is blankd and our second writer is TellerFarsight. 

Progress as of jam day 6: 

• Programming is advancing slowly but surely, with the main game menu mostly complete. 
• Character sprites are in concept stage. 
• The story is in late plotting  and outlining stages. 

Follow our progress here, on Tumblr, or on Discord.

I enjoyed throwing bricks at people. This probably says more about me than the game.

Mysteriously won't run on my laptop. I'll try it again on another computer tomorrow.

It's a cute theme and a fun game. I enjoyed playing it, even though this isn't a type of game I'm usually any good at.

I didn't know whether I would be able to submit my game at the end, which made it a little harder, but the jam still motivated me to finish writing the alpha of my 20K word text game. I wrote the last passage this afternoon and I keep having to remind myself that it's a huge milestone, even if the results aren't very tangibly impressive.