A new feature is added to the in-game smartphone – camera. It can be used for taking pictures of your girlfriend (and any other characters or things you want), and will be required for certain missions in the story mode. Photos you made can be viewed in your smartphone, or printed as posters to decorate walls in your apartment room.

A new video showing character creation process (girl). In the final game you’ll be able to choose to play as a girl or a boy. Additional hair styles and hair colors will be available in a beauty salon.

In the original (2D) Shoujo City game there was very little story and character background information. Who are you and what are you doing in that city? Who are those girls always standing in the street and why are you dating them? These and many other questions were left without answer.

Apart from all new graphics and gameplay features, Shoujo City 3D will have a real story line. The game will have two main modes:

• story mode – the game begins with you arriving to the school where you’ll be introduced to main game heroines and can choose one of them to date. Laika, Anette, and Yumi from the original game will appear only in this mode. After that the game will proceed for a certain amount of days, and every day you’ll have new events and quests to complete. Some quests and events will be required to complete a day, and some will be optional. The story mode will have several alternative endings depending on your actions and score in the game.
• sandbox mode – at the beginning of the game you’ll get a unique girlfriend (looks and individuality will be either randomly generated or chosen according to a personality test). By dating your girlfriend you can increase your intimacy level and unlock new activities and locations. This mode won’t have any scripted events and quests, so you can freely explore the city and participate in any activities. There is no “game end” condition in this mode.

The story mode will take a lot more time to develop (a few years, maybe), so my first goal is to release a playable sandbox mode, which will be used for demonstrating and testing various game features and gameplay elements.

A playable demo version with sandbox mode (hopefully) will be released in a few months from now.

A new video showing current progress on the shopping area, which will include several shops, one cafe, and metro entrance. Taiyaki shop is almost complete (needs a few additional interior elements) and working already, all other buildings are under construction.

Just finished making metro entrance for Shoujo City 3D, which will be used for traveling between different parts of Tokyo in the game. The very first station is called “Shin Sakura”. Not sure as yet if this name will be used in the actual game, maybe I’ll use actual station names instead.

Reference photo for metro entrance in Tokyo.

The school area will be the first location in Shoujo City 3D, and it will include the school itself and one street in front of the school entrance with several shops and other buildings. Right now I’m working on various road and street details, like pole lights, street signs, etc.

Reference photo for a manhole cover (Tokyo, Japan)

A lot of work is invested into faithful recreation in the game of various small unique things you can see in Japan – like chocolate taiyaki and vending machines, and even manhole covers and street trash cans. Working on all those small details takes almost infinite amounts of time and work, which means there can’t be any fast progress with the game, unfortunately. But that also means the game will have a completely unique appearance and feel to it, and that’s what one of my main goals is.

This is the basic map of the school in Shoujo City 3D, which will be used in the game as one of locations for dating and other activities. At this point it’s about 50% complete. All the buildings are finished, but most of interior is still missing.

A new video showcasing some clothing/customization options in Shoujo City 3D. Both player character and dateable girls have several equipment slots for changing clothes and accessories. 9 slots are implemented already, with 3 more (choker, gloves, hair accessories) to be added as yet. Apart from making your character to look unique, this feature will be used in the game for cosplay missions, where you’ll have to walk around the city and obtain several cosplay items to complete some outfit of an anime character.

One of the most requested features for Shoujo City was translation into other languages. This feature is very difficult to implement in the original (2D) game due to numerous bits of text being hard-coded into various files without any system or order, which made the task of finding all those elusive bits of text and editing them somewhat challenging.

Since so many people requested for this feature, Shoujo City 3D was designed from the very beginning to be easily compatible with any other languages in addition to English. All text is now stored in separate files with uniform structure and can be easily edited any time. Incomplete translations are also possible – if some particular line of text wasn’t translated as yet, the game will fall back to default English and then proceed to translated text whenever it’s available. Which means that translated text can be added into development builds of the game any time and without waiting for any final and complete translations.

Apart from English (default game language), the game will have Japanese and Russian language support. Availability of any other languages in the future will mostly depend on whether there will be people willing to help with translations.

In next post I’ll post details on the new character customization/clothes system, which will give a lot of freedom in the game for anime cosplay, or just making your girl friend look pretty. ^^

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laikastudio.shoujocity

Earlier this week the original Shoujo City (2D) for Android has reached 500,000 downloads at Google Play. Thank you everyone who plays and supports this project!