re:Dreamer for android

0.17.0 (10/21/2023) Current Anniversary Release:
re:Dreamer's huge fourth anniversary update, with just under 60,000 words, is live for everyone at the same time, with every feature unlocked! This means the entire visual novel is open with all its extra features, and if you've never read this title, now is the perfect place to start!
But first, sorry for the two-week delay! I hate that I broke my promise with this, but the CaptainCaption sprites took over two weeks to polish ("my" amazing new sprites from TiltSHIFT are comparatively cheap add-ons to Samantha's existing sprites, which have gotten yet another round of polish), and even working a 100-hour week with the writing didn't get this ambitious optional side story done in time.
The celebration of re:Dreamer's fourth anniversary is also a self-indulgent story for my 30th birthday (yes, this game first released on my birthday; the writing explains why), and it is presented as an act in two parts:
The first is an unfiltered look at my recent life, with talks about my recent revelations about my gender and the drama around it (which you are given the in-game choice to skip as drama can be draining and even boring for people to read even if nobody's name is used and I think it provides a lot of context about this update and why my attempts to find myself have been such a struggle), my worrying physical and mental health concerns, explaining how much making this visual novel means to me and being so thankful I can do this as my job and that other people care about it so much more than I expected, restating my mission statements for this project while stating a new mission I am giving myself of making sure people have the opportunity for self-identification and self-actualization without pressure to make a decision one way or the other (aka, no gender bigotry nor egg cracking, just a safe environment where you can ask questions and be suggested answers but not told who you are), and assorted small tangents of rambling.
While the second part is an extension from the first part and both parts elevate each other to be greater than the sum of their parts, there is an in-game jump to just that second part, which is a unique fourth wall break going into the edge cases of how the rights for everyone to have self-identification and self-actualization breaks down when self-determination hasn't been there from the start, scathing callouts of my self-righteous bullshit and how my recent character arc isn't as selfless as I claim or would like it to be, and the inherent contradictions of a creator saying they care about their work and the characters in it while from the characters' perspective their creator is a sick puppeteer pulling the strings on them and everyone else they have ever known in a grand deception of theater while being an uncaring figure who has been solely responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened to them.
Yes, I swore I would never break the fourth wall, but this visual novel will only ever get one fourth anniversary, and I decided very much not to do this in a shallow way like Doki Doki Literature Club did, so...
Also, in both parts, I have several important revelations about who I am as a person in real-time as I write, and I capture those moments as they happen. This is stuff like me genuinely experiencing gender euphoria over how my name sounds; gender dysphoria over how disgusting letting out any anger makes me feel; existential dread over my looming mortality; bitterness over how I had a choice to choose who I am and who to trust and I often chose wrong on both counts and am left holding regrets; frustration and confusion that trying to figure out who I am feels like a hopeless battle with answers that keep slipping out of my grasp, a spiral into hopeless depression as I realize my fear of getting hurt has lead to an inability to trust people which has further lead into me guarding who I am so closely that whoever that person is never had a proper chance to grow; and sense of optimism that my weird little game is somehow leaving a positive tiny impact on the world and that it's never too late for anyone to decide to start a journey to find who they are and assert their identity to themselves and the world.
It is certainly a unique reading experience, but it is also the most important writing I have ever done for myself, as all my writing ultimately is. I make personal breakthroughs on my path to being a more complete person I never thought I would, and if for nothing else, they serve the role of showcasing the mind of the author and trying to get you (the reader) to think about who you are, but of course, I won't give you the answers. I can only give you the opportunity to think about what it means to work to be yourself, and regardless if you are exactly the person who you thought you were, or if you learn something about yourself and discover there is a discrepancy between who you thought you were and who you are, both are equally valid, as you alone have the right to decide who you are and how you decide to share that, and yes, deciding to not share that is just as valid and sharing it.
I choose to share this journey I am on to find myself alongside the development of this visual novel I am making, as not only am I a writer who loves to show off this project like I'm a kid at a part and it's a cool stick I found as I excitedly explain why it's actually a magic forest katana gifted to me by a tree nymph and now I have to slay a dragon with it as I venture toward Castle Swing Set, but neither growth happens in a vacuum. I learn about parts of who I am through this project, and you see many parts of the real me through it. In both a literal and figurative way, we complete each other.
Anyways, um...
The Author's Note system has received a heavy overhaul for the option of displaying the CaptainCaption sprites during them... but unfortunately, this update is so late that only the new side route shows them. Those Author's Notes and I do have a unique red textbox now though!
I changed the entire file structure and variable nomenclature of the game away to stuff such as "2022_10_07" and "2022_10_08" instead of "day1" or "day2" to their dates, as this make even more sense for long-term use. I am over 200% positive this broke every single save, but I figured it'd be best to get this out of the way on a version of the game a lot of new people will be playing to keep compatibility better.
I hopefully finally fixed an issue with the dance arcade game that led to the help prompt showing up between saves, as described here. This really seems to be an elusive bug as I used to get it on my end a year ago but thought I had fixed it fully.
Redid the password system. It now uses hashed passwords instead of plaintext ones, so uh RIP to places like F95zone decrypting it.
Fixed a few broken expression parts for Samantha.
Removed the sprite viewer button from the quick menu. It just kept breaking in annoying ways and it drove Espeon and I insane trying to fix it. We'll probably get back to this one day when I am not late with an update, but for now, the button is inaccessible for users in compiled builds.
Espeon the randomness in Zone of the Zombies 2 breaking. Thanks, Ren'Py engine updates!
Fixed a spot here or there that broke from the Ren'Py engine update.
Fixed a brief CG issue with Britney breaking during the yuri topping sex scene that happened with lower Awkwardness.
Fixed right clicking breaking Ren'Py during the phone call with Zach's dad.
Fixed what was apparently a long-standing issue of Zoey's hair and eye color resetting to colors a player who no longer has a Sustainer password might have selected once they lose access to the ability to change those colors on the fly.
Standardized "damnit" for everyone but Britney, whose Texan accent slips through when she gets mad, so she'll use the more phonetic spelling "dammit" (although both are valid spellings).
A ton of spelling fixes and minor bug fixes.
0.16.3 (09/15/2023):
Britney's route has a lot of new writing for Day 3 night, with a dinner scene, a scene of Britney teaching Zach how to prepare for his inevitable upcoming period, Britney finding Zach's gender bender doujin stash, a sex scene with Britney topping Zach and trying to explore this discovered kink with him, and two scenes of the aftermath.
This means that Britney's Day 3 fully concludes with 18,724 new words, bringing the total day to 81,524 words. Now, while that's a lot of reading (based on the 250 words per minute average of English reading, respectively 1 hour 15 minutes & 5 hours and 26 minutes), the tool I use to capture the text length from individual folder and files is a bit greedier than the one built into the Ren'Py SDK for the overall script, potentially over-reporting by up to 56% extra. Still, that's like, respectively 47 minutes & 3 hours and 28 minutes, but because of C.H.E.A.T.S. and other text substitution methods, take reading times with more than a pinch of salt. I do not think I am doing a day this dense again, but it was nice to really show a day in Zach's new life in this much detail from the very start to the very end with very little in the way of gaps.
But enough with the dry details, since everyone wants to know more about the sex scene! This is the first "proper" sex scene for Britney's route, with amazing new CGs drawn by TiltSHIFT (Zoey's sprite artist). It's got a lot of moving parts as Zach and Britney move around on the bed, and it's a dialogue-heavy affair as it focuses on Britney pushing Zach to improvise a scenario to act out his gender bender fantasy, only for the lines between Zach and the character he is playing to blur as Britney doesn't know when to ease up and not rush things along at her fast pace.
Beyond that... a lot of the expressions in Britney's route got polished up, and there's some minor edits to the dialogue in a few places to be slightly better (notably with the start of Britney's route before the first choice menu and the Day 4 morning to better fit the events last night). I am now only missing a few spots here and there of "two girls standing around with their mouths hanging open" or wording that feels a bit clunky given my improved skills as a writer compared to two or more years ago, like right before they have sex for the first time (which definitely needs CGs itself so it's not an awkward moment of one Barbie doll eating another Barbie doll out), some less common C.H.E.A.T.S. variants, and the very start of the Day 2 date.
There's a new unique variant of the ripped gray XL hoodie at the start of Britney's route, with Zoey lifting the bottom hem up to show Britney just how much her body changed. Yes, it works with the SFW filter on to keep the boxers in place.
To reflect the Rich route's unfortunate cancellation (which you can read about here), the option to choose him has a bit of text from Zach explaining how he's definitely not choosing Rich, with a hyperlink to that Patreon Friday Update before jumping to choose someone else.
I fixed a minor issue with the sprite viewer grabbing showing expressions on odd cases (like Zoey's mouth_14F) that would return the incorrect expression.
The Sprite Viewer button is no longer in the quick menu because the update to Ren'Py 8.1.2 very annoyingly broke it (and hopefully nothing else; I need to be more careful when I update the engine).
Fixed a minor pathing issue in the arcade date. It's just the headache that keeps on giving, isn't it?
A few typo fixes here and there.
0.16.2 (08/13/2023):
All four of the starting reactions to the secret Zach's mom tells him in The Mom Route™ have been written, with the latest one involving Zach and Samantha's relationship being put on thin ice. I do like the writing here, but my mental health struggles meant that this is the only new writing of the update...
That major divergence point is now a distinct player choice, with access to some of those choices controlled by variables. The "partly cracked" and "partly repressed" paths are always open; to get the "fully cracked" path, you need therapy_answer not "Cis" and Trans stat greater than or equal to 4; to get the "fully repressed" path, you need therapy_answer not "Trans" and Trans stat less than or equal to 2. This hopefully gives people the extreme choice they want when they have stats in that direction while allowing nuance in how Zach (or Zoey) reacts to the news they get without having to change stats too much, even if it means I have to break a bit of my internal design document for how Z treats their gender.
Samantha's sprites have been completely redone... and by that, I mean I realized I messed up the outlines of her face from how TiltSHIFT delivered them to me and made them too harsh compared to Zoey's (meaning the fixes now make them look even more similar, something I thought would be a huge issue but which turned out not to be), she got new expressions (mostly mouths, but I composited some of Zoey's more vibrant faces onto hers), she now has tops to her bottom parts of the outfits (allowing me to mix and match as I see fit and meaning she isn't wearing yoga pants for the Day 1 stuff anymore since she just got back from going out to lunch with her friend and has nicer slacks on), her file system got simplified and her file size shrunk (thanks to clever layering), her colors were made more consistent, and a dozen other smaller fixes I am forgetting. Let me know if you like her old outlines more than these, as I could make a variant with makeup from the old one as it had more noticeable lips. By the way, my OCD and ADHD were so off the rails during this development period that I had to redo the remake. All in all, I easily spent over 60 hours during 2 weeks doing this... and I am worried I messed up the expressions somewhere, be it the RegEx replacement, the layer effects, or what.
A few of Zoey's outfits have gotten an overhaul to work better together without clipping issues, such as her white (really eggshell) turtleneck sweater (which now also has a whiter variant), her "Casual C" outfit, and all her jeans. Of special note is her Casual C outfit, as while it is not implemented in the game script, new versions where the text does not flip when pressing "Mirror Sprite" in the sprite viewer have been made. Of course, this begs the question why I am not making her wallet chain, zipper seam choker direction, sunglasses, shadows, hands, and so on not flip too. The answer is "I am not nearly that insane" as I am making a hard commit that the this extra work only applies to sprite parts with text focus, such as Molly's lanyard with her student ID visible, and hypothetically the student uniform badges down the line.
The sprite viewer is now visible on the quick bar, and I gave it a ton of code overhaul to make it run more smoothly (but mostly to give myself key binds to quickly check expressions of each character; it's a dev-only feature as it breaks accessability features). This might breaks saves (some of my 0.16.1 ones broke, but others did not) so as a precaution, the entire route jump menu is unlocked. Let me know if you find it distracting, but I know it takes up too much space on Android, so it's not on the quick menu there.
There is now a warning about the lack of incest to the mom route choice if you have content warnings enabled. I've also labeled all the bad ends the same way.
bPoint gains are now labeled if you have content warnings enabled, since it's kind of the "give me spoilers" option?
The naming scheme of Molly and Patrick's name box names has been simplified, making it a bit less convoluted to read them.
I polished up some of the expressions in Britney's route (some after Britney comes over to Zach's dorm, and some after the Day 1 sex to the start of the changing). I wanted to do more because I really got in a groove with this, but I needed to focus on writing, not "brain turn off" tasks... that didn't quite happen, unfortunately.
Fixed the sepia effect from the "flashback" near the start of Britney's route with the right clothes, and managed to make it work in-engine since the camera statement made it a lot easier than I expected.
0.16.1 (07/23/2023):
Molly, the tall hot redheaded student director in Britney's route, now has sprites! If you've checked the very spoiler-filled Britney outline, you'll know she ends up being a semi-major character in the route, and one important enough to warrant having sprites, which were drawn by Myumi, who also previously drew Britney's sprites.
Due to my current mental health struggles, this is a light update mostly featuring her updated art, but her Scottish accent got a total redux to be more accurate (thanks Scottish person who came by to help!), and some of her writing got changed (but not a ton).
The Molly and Patrick interrogation can now be continued after meeting the conditions to convince them that Zach is a trans man. This lets you see all the dialogue branches at once and even sabotage yourself back from convincing them, which I think it neat.
Even though Zach still identifies as a man at this point, an itch.io review "I used to REALLY like this, but telling the siblings in the Britney route that Z is a trans man, while playing as a trans WOMAN, makes me feel disgusting..." led me to writing a short scene of Zach confronting Britney for that (Trans >= 3 + Trans "therapy" answer + Control >= 3). Yes, I do read every single review (even the mostly-worthless F95zone ones).
Britney's meeting of Zach was changed to the start of her freshman year of high school and Zach's sophomore year of high school. This lines up better with other things going on in the outline.
The term "compression bra" has been substituted with "chest binder" in Britney's route to be more accurate to its function (and vice versa in Keisuke's route and elsewhere). The same change applies to the sprite viewer code and sprites filenames.
Zoey's maid waitress uniform outfit is in the game. It currently only exists in the first bad end, but it's planned to show up in all three major routes. I had to redo the Zoey sprites leggings as their own separate thing distinct from the top outfit piece and the bottom outfit piece to get this to work, so let me know if this breaks something in a way I missed.
The World Information Entries for "The Environment", "World War II", "Societal Issues", "Religion in AKR", and "The Space Craze" have been expanded (in ascending order of how much), with a new "Nuclear Energy" entry being added because it felt like a fun thing to flesh out.
A few of the World Information entries regarding the USSR as an existing thing have been changed to explain that the USSR dissolved in 1993 (two years later than in our history). This is because of a minor plot line in Britney's route with France being the preeminent European power that caused its dissolution through economic leverage, how France has continued on as the leading European power in the modern world, how Britney's mom (Elise) is of French ancestry, how Britney has a bit of Frenchness to her family culture, and that a part of the Becket family's wealth is explained through Elise's French immigrant dad making a few economic investments in Texas that did quite well. But it nothing crazy; the family just has a few semi-liquid assets abroad they could quickly cash in for about $800,000 if they ever needed to, but the passive returns on those and other assets are good enough that they bolster the family's already great income from Britney's dad's work as a partner at a big law firm and let her mom run a gardening business that operates on a loss.
A Sustainer patron has a minor cameo in the first bad end (Zach deleting the app).
0.16.0 (06/03/2023) Current Public Version:
The Mom Route has 2 new long scenes: Zoey coming out to her mom the morning after cracking (both a Trans 5 and Trans "therapy" answer requirement), and Zach's eggshell taking damage after his mom confesses her secret about him yet still loving her and wanting to help her (either a "therapy" answer not Cis or Trans >= 3 requirement). There's a fourth variant to how Zach responds to this news that needs to be written still (along with the rest of the route), but I kind of had my life become extremely stressful lately and didn't have the mental health to focus on fiction when my own life is changing so much (I'm literally coming out to my parents in 2 hours). The writing here is still good (especially in the coming out scene), but it has a noticeably stronger "wish fulfillment" tone to it as I was struggling with anxious thoughts of my own mom accepting me as her daughter (she won't) and treated a bit of it as a therapeutic way to collect my own thoughts and anxieties and to give Samantha some of the lines I dream my own mom would say (but still with that Samantha twist to it).
You can now skip the second half of the Day 1 Introduction's psychology lecture via a clearly-labeled menu choice. Beyond that, the Day 1 intro lecture got trimmed with Awkwardness >= 4, again. I am not doing this again, and I am sick of being yelled at for this part existing.
Fixed issues with a text with Ai breaking on Keisuke Day 2.
The engine has been updated to Ren'Py 8.1, meaning things like old saves will probably break.
Fixed some wonky unintentional behavior caused by exiting the sprite viewer screen under very specific conditions.
Tweaked the one line in the world information entry about autogynephilia to say that Zach's interpretation of its definition is different, not that the world of the VN uses a different definition.
The file structure for the Mom Route is now better organized, but saves will not be compatible. Use the Story Jump menu on the title to get to Samantha starting to tell her son-turned-daughter a secret she had been excepting to hide for the rest of her life.
A few minor corrections to C.H.E.A.T.S. branching in Britney's route on Day 3.
Zoey's loosened compression bra now works with the T-shirt.
I fixed the clock in Zach's room being an hour behind. The hour hand also increments in fractions based on the minute, like real clocks.
FixedZoey's bra not being taken off in the full repression branch of the Mom Route.
Fixed an issue with the long hair with bangs breaking the tattered hoodie outfit.
Fixed a bug with text interpolation in the Keisuke brat taming bed scene. This might have just been from the new Ren'Py engine update so who knows if anyone ever actually experienced it?
The sultry font Z and Samantha use is now adjusted for better line spacing compatibility with the rest of the fonts.
A few typo fixes, mostly in the Mom Route, World Information entries, and Keisuke Day 1 between the start of the mirror examination HCG and the start of the showers, but I got a lot of them reported this update period.
0.15.0 (05/10/2023) Current Public Version:
Samantha Taylor, Zach's mom (and a genius mentally ill demisexual yandere disaster housewife), now has sprites! While she's admittedly a minor character in every route except hers (more on that later), she has had a major effect on the life of her child that cannot be ignored or overlooked as she has spent more time with Zach than anyone else in his life, was pretty much his only parental figure for most of his life, and depending on how you look at it, his best friend (or at least, the person he is closest to).
Her sprites were done by TiltSHIFT (and very heavily edited by me for strict consistency), and while he is the same artist who did Zoey's sprites and the CGs in the game that aren't placeholders, his art style has drifted enough over the past 2 years where it almost seems like it's a different artist mimicking Zoey's sprites. At least her breast size is consistent...
She has 3.5 poses (distinct 2 head angles, but she has arm variant on her second pose and each head angle has a unique clipboard pose for her Thanksgiving outfit), 7 outfits (with many sub-variants like colors and outfit parts not selectable in the sprite viewer), many held objects in her hand for her third pose, 4-ish hairstyles (some are minor variants), 3 types of glasses, a headband, a Santa hat, and a ton of expressions.
Samantha has 20 expressions for each head angle, and every single facial expression part is unique. This means that she has 16,000 possible unique expressions of eyes, eyebrows, and mouths she could make, which shoots up to 18,400 unique expressions because I gave her extra mouths from Zoey and Britney's sprites that feel more natural for talking. If you then factor in her 6 blush strengths, her 3 gloom levels (including the base without gloom), 3 possible facial emotes (a sweat drop, tears, and a single tear), and 2 different types of yandere eyes, she has a total of 5,299,200 unique faces she could make, not even counting that I can dynamically adjust the strength of her yandere eyes. This is an outright dizzying amount of combinations at my fingertips, but that massive range gives her a ton of subtlety with her expressions in a way that Zoey can't quite match as many of her daughter's base facial expressions have duplicate parts.
Honestly, it's crazy that while Samantha doesn't have her daughter's outfit versatility, she has what are in my opinion the significantly better sprites. I'm down bad for her and she turns me into a useless pining lesbian.
But enough about the sprites! Fulfilling a Sustainer request from Sandra and my own promise to expand the blursed "Mom Route" as soon as Samantha's sprites were finished, her writing has resumed.
The start of the route has been completely overhauled to be a canon route and a few minor details have been adjusted, but her writing still isn't finished this update as editing her sprites simply took too long (seriously, I wasn't expecting the image editing + scaling + coding to take almost 70 hours total, and I had to go back and fix her Pose BC's expressions because the outlines were different strengths than Pose A's and that ate up an entire day).
There's still a ton of new writing here (at least an hour, but Awkwardness makes this length vary a lot), but it stops at a tantalizing cliffhanger. I won't go into spoilers, but there are two major variants to Samantha dropping a bombshell nuke on her son-turned-daughter (later to be expanded to five; I just ran out of gas editing art and need to rest for a few days). If you play with Trans 5 and Trans "therapy" answer (like I know at least 63% (that's the gender bender number!!!) are because of the survey), you might get something many of you have been champing at the bit for a long, long time.
The conclusion will be in the next update to create a fully-canon route of at least 2 hours, possibly 2 and a half. Remember when I said this was going to be 60 minutes, then 90 minutes?
The Mom Route has extremely significant differences based on the "therapy" answer Zach gave Ai (and to a lesser extent, the value of the Trans stat). Trans and Cis have the biggest differences between them (of course), but "AGP" can function as a nice middle ground between "trans girl wish fulfillment that melts the heart of any trans girl reading it as it fills with envy and jealously" and "a deep dive into parental and childhood drama and trauma caused by severe mental health issues, and how even a loving mother with the best of intentions might still be a terrible mother." And yes, I know AGP is bunk that has harmed trans women in untold numbers and it turned out I was not the exception to the rule, but Zach incorrectly thinks he is that exception.
More than any other writing in re:Dreamer, Samantha's scenes get extended and altered with Awkwardness 4 and Awkwardness 5. Even if 4 or 5 are not your usual Awkwardness values, try her route with them as the many scenes that get altered or unlocked with those stats are heavily worth checking out as I think they show just how much of a dorky goofball Samantha is, especially around Zach.
I fixed the Android phone text from clipping into the phone, but it came at the cost of having to make the text smaller to match the way it looks on PC. Let me know if it's legible on your own phone screen or not, but based on quick informal polling of Android users, they said it was legible on their screen.
The NVL mode (full-screen text) now has thicker outlines for backgrounds that aren't its default 80% opacity black overlay, increasing legibility.
I somehow took out the line that the best friend Zach picks gets a minor wish if they win re:Dreamer (think of it like Zach's wish being the limitless wish from Fairly Odd Parents vs the friend's wish being like the restricted ones bound by Da Rules). It's been re-added.
Zach finally has the very important World Information entry on Zach's stuffed animals and their extensive lore. It unlocks in the Mom Route (and later on in the first home visit of the other routes).
Zoey's sprites have a new medium-length hair option. See if you can find out where it shows up in the game!
Zoey's sprites have a new maternity bra and underwear set her mom lends her in the Mom Route. I made it myself from the existing Underwear C set (the plain orange one), partly because I needed it and TiltSHIFT was busy, and partly to test the viability of editing Zoey's breast size across her sprites for consistency myself.
I promise that I have not forgotten about making the writeup about how we could change Zoey's breast size, and not by shrinking them (as they'd only get reduced by half a cup size, if that), but making the size more consistent across her outfits, making them consistent across her poses (they're quite a bit smaller in Pose A than Pose B or Pose C), and making them rounder and perkier (they noticeably flop over her arm in Pose C on most outfits). Recent art priorities have just, well, taken priority.
To simplify the complicated issues of fixing Zoey's breast size:
TiltSHIFT's style has drifted a ton in the past 2 years and he can't quite replicate his old style he used in Zoey's sprites (seriously, Samantha's layer structure was largely incompatible with Zoey's); he has forgotten how the folder structure for Zoey's sprites' Clip Studio Paint file was organized and had to be sent flattened versions of Zoey's nude poses for a new outfit he just did as he could not navigate the file; he's got better communication skill than Myumi and is more professional, but that comes at the price of being more expensive; and it is the utmost importance to stay on great terms with him as he wasn't particularly receptive to redrawing sprites and has expressed interest in drawing new CGs instead, and that is honestly what we should be throwing him at to fix some of the lopsided porn/text ratio this game has.
Myumi is less expensive than TiltSHIFT and can almost perfectly mimic TiltSHIFT's old style, but he is slower, prone to going AWOL, and would like to make new characters and CGs instead of outfits (let alone redrawing outfits) like he has been doing for the past several months; and as he's trying to do more professional art, I'd like to help him create things he can put in a portfolio instead of edited art (and again, the porn/text ratio of this game needs fixing).
While I lack any drawing skills, I am good enough with Clip Studio Paint that I can edit Zoey's sprites for generally "good enough" results, but it takes forever, slowly drives me insane (seriously, my brain was numb by the time I hit the last stretch of polishing Samantha's sprites for consistency, and I felt something inside of me, likely my soul, break when I realized her Pose BC expressions needed fixing and that took me 10 hours straight of work), editing art is a lost opportunity cost of me writing this visual novel, and while the results are adequate, they aren't as good as TiltSHIFT or Myumi's work.
Zoey's sprites now have a recolor of the complex compression bra for the routes that aren't Britney's route. It's labeled as "chest binder" (although to be honest, I probably need to swap the usage of "chest binder" and "compression bra" as the more complex device Zach and Britney make in Britney's route has binding features not found on compression bras, but that's a project for another release).
Zoey's sprites now have a modular Christmas outfit. It consists of a red off-shoulder sweater dress, thick tights (which are internally named "stockings" to keep with the Christmas theme), and a Santa hat. It matches with Samantha's Christmas outfit and they pair well when on the screen together.
Lots of typo fixes from dedicated readers actually telling me about them. Thanks! This also alerted me to the fact that my Visual Studio Code spelling dictionary was broken, so that's cool...


0.14.1 (04/07/2023) Current Sustainer Version:
Britney's route has a decent amount of "new" writing (30 minutes, if not a bit more) on Day 4, which is Monday and Zach's first day of school as a woman while disguising his new body. It's got a bit of overlap with Keisuke's route (mostly much of the psychology lecture being the same), but outside of the schedule being the same, almost all of the writing is new. Chiefly, Zach actually did his engineering orientation class final project with the chest binder rather than having to beg his mom for a design to steal, and his break period between PYSC 100 and ENG 100 involves Zach calling his mom for advice on the project and having a pretty detailed talk with her... before things go south.
Keisuke's Day 4 has also been fully polished with the higher standards I have now. Not much of the writing changed, but the expressions are much better, as are the animations.
The very start of Britney's route has been cleaned up with better expressions, more animation polish, and a bit clearer writing about Zach's opinion of Britney to Ai. I still have to do until the middle of the Day 2 mall date, but a release needs to get out the door on time for once.
This means I have unfortunately cut the other start to the route (demanding Britney come over to explain everything in-person instead of texting and being misunderstood). I like the writing there, but as it's really not needed and retroactively patching it in doesn't make much sense at this point when I should be trying to avoid revision hell and move the game forward.
I fixed an animation issue or two in the Britney arcade date.
There's another file structure change, but many of the labels stayed intact so maybe the saves are going to work still? If they break, use the jump menu to get to where you need to go and rebuild your saves, as it is once again fully unlocked.
Ai's pink phone text background has been returned after breaking.
The phone now uses date and time stamps in certain locations, better mimicking a real phone screen.
Thanks to P.Bird's script checks (a former Magical Camp dev), the intro day is a lot better and clearer grammatically.
0.14.0 (03/05/2023) Current Backer Version:
The Zach dorm room masturbation scene has been heavily reworked with gorgeous brand-new art from TiltSHIFT and almost entirely brand-new writing. Espeon has reverently called it "quite possibly the best vn tg scene in all of existence" and while I'm not willing to go that far, it's very, very hot.
This means that the writing and expressions of the whole Zach dorm room masturbation scene (not just the CGs itself, but the prelude and the aftermath into the "therapy" session too) are now up to modern standards. In fact, everything besides the starting day of Britney's route to the middle of the mall date (once they go inside) and the Keisuke route from the start of the showers to the end of the phone call on day 4 is now up to modern standards in terms of overall polish with expressions consistency and variance, writing, animations, SFX, and overall presentation. There's still a lot more to polish up (I shudder thinking of what is involved with cleaning up the Keisuke frat party), but I now consider RD to be in the "modern" era and almost entirely free of the messier days of its roots where I had a lot less of an idea where it was going. It's humbling and yet inspiring, if that makes sense.
Zach has a new tattered gray hoodie and sweatpants outfit that which shows up during this edited writing (although its true use is for the start of Rich's route for a secret reason). It's a hand-me-down from his dad that he's held onto for housework, and at the start of the visual novel, it's the only thing he has that covers fully covers his new female body. It's a wildly complicated outfit that I can't justify leaving as a non-custom outfit as it has so many variants, and as counter-intuitive as it seems, the outfit will break less in custom mode because of the way I built the layers.
Some of Keisuke and Britney's writing has been adjusted for continuity of the new tattered sweats. I still need proper briefs for Zoey, but "boxers" are still in use in the meantime.
Zoey's "men's jeans" in the sprite viewer have been more accurately renamed to "mom's jeans" as they are hand-me-downs from Samantha. Zach is very reluctant to wear his mom's clothing now that he has a woman's body that looks so much like hers, but desperate times can call for desperately measures.
I edited Zoey's nude breasts in Pose A to make them perkier and rounder to match the intended shape and firmness for updating them later (this also made them 5% bigger). I think they look damned nice, but standardizing her cup size across all of her outfits is simply beyond my grasp. TiltSHIFT or Myumi will have to be commissioned for that. Don't worry; the old nude Pose A breasts are still in the game and can be changed with a variable toggle, but I am leaving that option out for you players at this moment.
Thanks to Espeon, the phone text messages now save the sender after saving and reloading. There's also data in the list for who sent what for what time and what date they sent it that will be used in later releases of the VN.
I added a new menu choice to help Britney with her theater stuff without making it a bet during the Day 2 arcade date (or at lunch, if the question never got posed or Zach won the only game he can win on the second bet). Choosing it triggers a variable an rewards a bPoint and a bit of new text (the one in the arcade that shows up by avoiding Mrs. Puck Man both times is quite to my liking :3c).
I added a line to make Britney a little pouty about not having sex on Saturday night (Britney Day 2) as she was kind of looking forward to it.
I added a few more author's notes in Keisuke's new writing during the sex scenes.
The IQ part in the day 1 lecture is now locked behind Awkward >= 4. I finally got yelled at enough to gate it despite how I consider it relevant for the story because I'm sick of it causing drama every few weeks. In its place is new writing that is a lot more blunt about the issues Zach has with his genius mom.
The precise variable control of keisuke_devotion is now "None", "Soft", or "Hard" instead of a True/False that relies on other variables to check the severity of how yandere Zach/Zoey is acting.
The maximum amount of bPoints available at any given moment are now tracked as a variable internally. This (and the change to the devotion variable) are in preparation for on-the-fly adjustment of route variables as a Sustainer patron feature.
The C.H.E.A.T.S. screen now includes an adjustment for the "therapy" answer because of how important of a variable it is in every route. Backer patrons get in-game adjustment to it and the rest of C.H.E.A.T.S., as usual.
The "therapy" answer is now a persistent variable that saves in saves to make the above not roll back. Making this work destroys save compatibility, hence the major version change. You should really be using the route jump menu for saves if you're not sure, tbh...
The menu choice to go to the C.H.E.A.T.S. screen in-game is now clearer about how the system can change the length of the story Zach tells since that length has been a persistent issue from readers and I'm sick of being blamed for being a bad writer by impatient people unable to read a settings menu made to address their concerns.
Fixed "moaningzoeyunknown" being improperly defined after changing how Zach/Zoey uses variables for the text colors. She's only been used twice, but now those times won't throw an error.
The question for the way to start Britney's route got further clarified to explain that Zach is willing to be manipulative in the shorter stub one. The choice box for the phone also got redone to line up with the look of the other choice bars.
I had somehow mislabeled Keisuke Day 10 as Day 9 and Keisuke Day 9 as Day 8. That's been fixed.
While it's borderline unreadable, the PNG flowchart is now being included again alongside the legible SVG one as it allows for a quick glance of the new or edited content in the way that the SVG doesn't as it's hard to zoom out properly on some devices.
I fixed a few minor animation issues in the Britney Day 2 arcade.
A number of small typo fixes and expression errors fixed.
0.13.2 (02/11/2023) Current Public Version:
With over 90 minutes of varied new writing, this update follows Zach and Britney on their afternoon after lunch. The important event in it is the first introduction of Zach's jovial and mildly autistic father, who Zach calls up to talk to about him possibly renovating the church next door (he works as the chief restoration agent for what is essentially Zillow). Along the way, Zach gets led into several winding and unexpectedly personal conversations with the man who has been so absent in his life (most are about how much he fucking loves his fucking wife and how much he fucking loves fucking his fucking wife; yes, both parents are like this with Zach). I think the writing here is quite good and really shows "Oh, so this is Zach's dad, and Zach is clearly his son." But is Zach still his son, and would a daughter be able to reconnect with her dad in the same way that a son could? Zach is desperate for a male role model in his life right now since he feels like he needs a guidepost of a father as a reference point for his own masculinity (or lack thereof) and is going to go crazy trying to figure this out on his own.
This is as good of a place as any to state that even at the max Trans settings, Zach is still very hesitant to accept himself (or herself) as a woman named Zoey, for reasons such as:
Trans 5 Zoey is still an egg and an extremely stubborn individual who does not want to admit that they might be an woman inside and out because she is "supposed" to be a man. She might be a woman, or is she a man who just thinks she wants to be a woman and is going to regret getting stuck as one for the rest of her life? These anxious thoughts of doubt plague Zoey, and going back to being a guy is the path of least resistance. Besides, as Zoey sees it, Ai isn't exactly the most trustworthy "therapist," and her advice could easily be coming from a place of manipulating Zach into being a woman for her perverted game!
LGBT rights and awareness are about 15-18 years behind in this setting and the government is more conservative, so a person being trans is a much bigger deal than it is in modern America. Zoey in this setting would have to come out as a post-op trans woman with comically large breasts to everyone she knows, and that is an unsavory and even embarrassing thought for her and she's afraid most people would think she's a pervert.
Acknowledging herself as a woman means Zoey must acknowledge herself as her mother's daughter, which is a frightening prospect as Zoey looks so much like the insane genius who has been trying to live through her child for their entire life and is worried that would give her mom a steroids injection to do that even more. Zoey hasn't realized this, but a lot of her mother's terrible skills as a parent come from the fact that she had geared herself to raise a daughter, had always wanted a daughter, thought she was getting a daughter based on early medical tests when pregnant, and then got a son instead, but she knows something is weird with her mom slightly resenting her existence despite trying very hard not to because, yes, she always wanted a daughter instead. Even if Zoey doesn't let her mom control her life, she still views herself as having to let her into her life more as her daughter since that's how daughters are supposed to be, and that is just a worrying thought with how much their relationship has soured over the years.
Later on in Britney's route, there are a lot of complicated and overlapping spoiler reasons that essentially boil down to Zoey thinking "Britney would think I am lying about being a woman inside to try and make her like me more" and "I know how Britney is as an ally, and she will throw herself under a bus to defend her girlfriend in a way that she wouldn't defend her boyfriend, and that will have catastrophic consequences for her life."
Later on in Keisuke's route, Zoey might be placing Keisuke on such a pedestal that she thinks "a guy as wonderful as him deserves a real woman" and is afraid to express femininity around him in case her chivalrous best friend stops seeing his best friend as a man and starts sees a woman he needs to help.
In Rich's route, Rich's stated goal is to turn Zach into Zoey through and through while helping her survive re:Dreamer, and letting herself accept that is letting Rich win.
I am trying to mirror the hesitance expressed by some real trans women in regards to their own realization about who they really are. As you might expect, this game has a rather sizeable audience of trans women, primarily in its Discord server. Despite me, the primary creator of this visual novel, being a straight cis male, I have apparently hit a lot of the IRL plot beats for a trans woman struggling with realizing her identity and weighing socially transitioning and fully accepting who she is versus doubting her earlier realization and staying closeted. Nobody has the exact same journey with coming out (and I've seen dozens at this point), and Zoey's is slower and more grueling that most, but if you want an exact estimate of the earliest Zoey realizes she is a woman and fully acknowledges it, the answer is mid-December.
I need to build up dramatic tension for the first arc of each route, and Zoey having her head buried in the sand about her identity is one of the core ingredients to how I want to do that.
With Trans 5 specifically, it makes Zoey feel funny and weird to be called a woman in a way that she isn't sure she likes yet. She hasn't yet realized this is validation triggering a rush of gender euphoria yet since she's never felt anything like it, but it makes her head go all fuzzy and is frankly very embarrassing to her how just a few small words make her so flustered. I basically view this as something I witness nearly daily of a trans woman being called cute or receiving validations and reacting with panicked embarrassment. They might say they hate it and deny being cute, but I've seen how much these women crumple under a compliment like that and how cute that is.
Zoey is the narrator of this visual novel, and they are an unreliable one at that is technically telling the story years after the fact. She is putting a spin on her own story to not just admit "I liked being called a woman named Zoey nearly right from the start" since that's still embarrassing for her to admit even after accepting herself and living as a woman for years.
Now that this tangent from me answering a question on a forum is out of the way... Additionally, this update fulfills a Sustainer request from Natalie, who requested a girl of the same name make an appearance as Britney's roommate (I can't she's the first person to ask to be in the game). The conversation is relatively brief, but it deals with Zach trying to learn more about Britney's embarrassing middle school personality these girls have known each other since middle school, as well as Britney taking some pads from her for Zoey, and if Britney now knows there's a cost to the hair length changes, taking her salon kit. Britney won't be able to do this for free, however, and she'll have to help Natalie with a bit of her political science homework, which gives her an excuse to talk about how bullshit capitalism is.
The two main starting paths on Britney's route are now worded to be a lot clearer with what Zach's intentions are (sincere but clueless, or somewhat manipulative).
The start of the blursed Mom Route got a minor pass of polish to line up a few small lore details.
An extra line has been added to the Britney Day 2 mall date phone call with Samantha (Zach's mom) where she says she's glad called her again so soon after their call on Friday (which Ai overhears).
An extra line has been added to the Day 2 Britney mall date ending to say that Britney and Zoey went to what is basically REI for a few cheap plastic bladder water bottles. I said in the date earlier they were getting them, but I forgot to have them say that they had. I also forgot to make Zach buy a resistor for a voltage divider at RadioCity.
An extra line has been added to the Britney Day 3 salon visit where Zoey states out loud that she looks a lot like her mom (which Ai overhears).
An extra line has been added to the Britney Day 3 scene where Zach is changing into the new chest binder outside of the church where Britney states it can transform into a regular bra if Zach unzips one zipper and causes some extra fabric to unfurl. It'll be a small but relevant plot detail in the theater should Zach be attending it as a woman.
The lunch at WcDonald's has a few new lines from Britney to make her stance on America's politics clearer (as well as the contradictions between what she believes and how she lives).
Zach's mom's name box color has been adjusted from #eb3f3a to #ea3c53 (which this website calls "Desire") to better match the eye color of her upcoming sprites (they're slightly pinker than Zach/Zoey's eyes).
The hex color code for Zach's blue and pink text is now controlled via a variable. I was mostly just cleaning up code but this could have future applications for changing text slowly over time.
I forgot to have Zach speak in blue text with Britney's pastor. That's been fixed.
I changed the current end of Keisuke's route to them just going to an exercise pool with a private reservation since that's more important to plot development than a failed attempt at weightlifting.
Britney now locks her car. I forgot to give an SFX for that earlier.
One of Ai's blush layers on her B pose got adjusted a bit. It was too high on her face and got lowered.
The World Information is now more direct in wording its role as an optional but recommended reading in the intro page and the setting that appears when the game is launched for the first time.
Also, the World Information entries now have slightly better text layout (greedy word placement and a margin away from the scrollbar) and the scrollbar is now selectable with the arrow keys too, meaning there is full controller support for the screen (as unwieldy as it may be).
From now on, the flowchart is an SVG as it is too big to export properly as a PNG from diagrams.net without becoming blurred. It should open with most browsers and I have confirmed it works on phones (at least, the file itself does. No idea about the button mention below).
Clicking the button to open the flowchart no longer breaks every other screen by making every button click open the flowchart again.
The Android version's quick menu no longer overlaps with the dialogue box when it has more than 4 lines. I don't know how I forgot about this for so long.
0.13.1 (01/12/2023):
Britney has some very lengthy new writing of what Zach does on his Sunday before meeting Britney after Mass to discuss her BBQ cookout fundraiser with her pastor and a casual lunch date to WcDonald's. I'm keeping something in this under wraps since I want it to hit readers in the gut when they realize what it is.
A number of the existing World Info entries have been polished up (specifically, the history entries).
Britney has a lot more World Info entries and has more attention paid to how she met Zach in her expanded main one.
Zach's dead but beloved grandpa has several new World Info entries. Zach's grandpa has a profound effect on Zach's early life (far more than his dad did) and he deserves the attention of detailed lore. These entries are going to unlock throughout the script in various places, mostly in Britney's route as part of Zach's arc for that route is hearing Britney's talk about her dad making him want to reconnect with his dad (the father of his grandpa), realizing his dad was also deeply in grief after the man's death, forgiving him for not being more present in his life, and making steps to be in each others life more from now on.
Zach's dad (finally!) has a World Info entry.
Keisuke now has an option to export his sprites. Ai needs this in the future (not Ryouichi, fuck him) but I did this for Keisuke for easier references for an artist.
There's now "Randomize" and "Default" buttons on the C.H.E.A.T.S. screens that do exactly what you think they do.
Espeon fixed an issue that could break Tower Topper if failed on the second-to-last line.
A few more music tracks now fully loop.
There's now a warning on other path for Britney to let readers know it's the start with significantly less content.
Typo fixes here and there, you know the drill.
0.13.0 (12/13/2022):
re:Dreamer has moved over from Ren'Py v7 (which is based on Python 2) to Ren'Py v8 (which is Python 3 based). The game overall runs a decent bit more smoothly (especially those laggy arcade games!), and while I did thoroughly test things (and got Espeon's help making sure things work), there is the chance I missed something important. This is a fundamental engine change that is going to break legacy saves, so the entire jump menu is once again unlocked to everyone regardless of a Patron password.
The long-neglected "Alone" route has been polished up, with the better care given to expressions, writing, C.H.E.A.T.S. paths, animations, and consistency on the level of the latest Keisuke writing. A good bit of the writing is the same, but it's a bit more... snappy, since it's some of the oldest writing that exists in the game, and I did tend to ramble and dance around getting to a point 3-ish years ago.
Most importantly, Haze's shitty old sprite is gone, and "Hot Zach" takes his place, making the selfcest infinitely more cursed. The CGs still need replacing to make purple placeholder Zoey finally bite the dust in all but the color variant in the sprites, but TiltSHIFT is doing the sprites for Zach's mom after he finishes his current work for the HCGs for the masturbation scene in Zach's dorm room before the "therapy" scene with Ai.
I fixed a bunch more of the songs to loop properly. This game's audio design is very important to me, and while I've been careful to use CC SFX for all the SFX that aren't from Umineko (it was still installed on my PC as I had just gotten done reading it when development on re:Dreamer had started back in September 2019), it's... going to destroy my soul to replace the soundtrack someday, but that'll be the very, very last thing I ever do for this game for full commercial release.
A few fixes of things I missed in 0.12.0, mostly small stuff like typos and expressions. As always, let me know if you spot any more.
0.12.0 (11/23/2022):
Get fucked, lesbians! The somewhat neglected start of Keisuke's route is back in focus with refined polish. From the option choice of getting on Keisuke's route to the end of the first HCGs with him in his dorm room, the sharpness of the writing, reduced rambling verboseness (although much of what was there is still behind Awkward >= 4 with new layers of polish), facial expressions, character animations, stylistic consistency, sound effects, music looping, extra C.H.E.A.T.S. variants, and overall quality have been polished to a honed edge that in my opinion surpasses the high bar for quality, polish, and attention to detail set by the most recent Britney writing. Did I mention that it's 4.5 hours, of which nearly 3.5 hours of is brand-new writing? 4 sex scenes, too?!
Before I get to explaining the big thing, I want to point out that part of the edits involve Zach realizing (with Control >= 4) that it's a good idea to get sunglasses for the walk to Keisuke's dorm room. It's the same scene as without them, but Zach now has sunglasses and will either wear them, or take them off them off when talking to people, either by moving them on top of his head or holding them in his hand, before ultimately just putting them in his pocket when he goes inside Keisuke's dorm building. Seriously, I love women wearing sunglasses, so this slight outfit change gives Zoey a dorky cool girl vibe that I can't get enough of.
Anyways, that big thing is that those placeholder menu options when Keisuke walks in on Zach masturbating are now able to be picked, and they lead to 2 new alternatives to the sex scenes in Keisuke's dorm room. Fantastic new art commissioned from TiltSHIFT (and heavily edited by me for stylistic consistency with things such as the hair color, overall shading tint, breast size, belt direction, zipper, etc.) has been added to the game for these, as well as for replacing the placeholder art in the Keisuke dorm room scenes that existed previously. Purple-haired placeholder Zoey isn't quite gone from the game yet, but her time is getting very short; also, from now on, I will not be doing color variant for the CGs as these are not going to be in a final version of the game and they take up to 4 hours of time for each CG to make, and I have much more important things to do with the development of this game to move it forward rather than to the side.
This means that there are 3 different ways Zach's relationship with Keisuke can turn more intimate based on how honest Zach is with his best friend: full honesty and an immediate confession of guilt lets Zach off the hook with a slap on the wrist and a light bit of fingering that Zach has to agree to (or begs Keisuke to get the fuck out so Zach can finish), Zach only confessing his guilt when explicitly and unambiguously questioned about what he was doing that leads to Keisuke being mad but a long personal conversation that makes Keisuke briefly forget what Zach did until Zach accidentally reminds him (and lets himself get sent into an aroused tailspin before asking Keisuke if he wants to feel his tits... you know, for science...), and a completely redone version of the harsh punishment scene that had previously been the only option.
I make it as clear as possible with prior foreshadowing and dialogue in the moment that your choices can lead Zach into a dubcon scene, but there is now also a bad end where Zach can walk out of Keisuke's dorm and end their friendship right there (as well as his chances of ever turning back into a man). If you don't like the dubcon scene, avoid it, but it makes sense with reasons in the secret lore and Keisuke outline; also, Keisuke's tone has been made a lot clearer and is way less... dubcon-y. Don't worry, Rich is going to repurpose a lot of the tone of this writing for his sex scenes with Zach.
There's some polish to a few of Britney's scenes, and a bit of new content for Day 3 morning with her, but Keisuke kind of took over this release.
I changed the first lines of narration as Zach wakes up at the very start of the game to remove the "I'm Zach Taylor" part. Zach/Zoey is technically narrating the facts of the game after it has happened and it'd be weird for Zoey to describe herself like that in the past tense, and this (plus a few other slight changes) make it more clear that this story is being told in the past tense with ambiguity about whether or not the narrator is still this person. Plus, I think it's a bit smarter and less blunt.
Zach's mom calls Zach "Zachary" (his full first name that he hates) when she gets really upset at him. Yes, she knows he hates the full name, but she use it to exert her authority as a parent.
The World Information entry for Zach's mom, Samantha Taylor, has been greatly expanded, giving her a more sympathetic role as an antagonist in Zach's life rather than that of an uncaring villain. This isn't actually too much of a tone shift for her as she was already on that trajectory for the Keisuke route; remember, the "Keisuke" route is more like the "Zach (and Keisuke)" route as Keisuke is a more static character who takes a bit of backseat to Zach on the long arc to being Zoey. Anyways, Zach's mom is going to be a more important part of Keisuke's route than in the other routes, so it's important to get these details squared away so there's a path for a partial redemption and even healing of her relationship with her son-turned-daughter.
"The Egg Cracker" (aka, Ai's "therapy" session) has gotten a pass of the same polish to the expressions and writing as the first major chunk of Keisuke's first day. It's still largely the exact same, but... more refined and focused. It's weird to accept that this game has a 13% chance to change the gender identity of anyone who played it, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming. If you're going to realize who you are because of a sucker punch from a pornographic visual novel, the most likely scene to make you realize that might as well be as good as it can be.
Ai has a brief explanation about re:/Dreamer's quests and game mechanics. I somehow forgot to add this earlier.
The jump to the transformation scene now includes the menu choice for setting C.H.E.A.T.S. that was the screen right before it begins, and this jump will always be unlocked since it's the easiest way to set new C.H.E.A.T.S. for a playthrough (and the transformation sequence is so good that I can see people wanting to return to it). I need to add a full gallery at one point, but this game's LayeredImage system is pretty damned complex so I'd essentially have to make a small version of the sprite viewer for every single CG.
There are a ton of new author's notes everywhere.
Zach's stutters have been standardized to the first consonant sound, not just the first letter (i.e., "Wh-What" and "St-Stop" but not "W-What" or "S-Stop"), he no longer has any stutters in his thoughts, and the way he stutters (specific words, sounds, and parts of sentences) has been given more firm consistency. Also standardized is Britney's very, very uncommon stutter that shows up in a grand total of 5 times in 1500 lines of dialogue. To show how well she is doing with that, compare that number to Zach having 390 lines with stutters in them over of 4500 lines of dialogue. That's just the lines that have a stutter in them, not the number of individual stutters, but I'm not gonna get more precise metrics for each count and add in the variants of Zach's speech with unique speaker variants and the weird text substitution method I have now that would likely shoot this number up to about 10% of his total lines having at least 1 stutter.
The World Information entry for Zach's phone has been expanded to explain how Zach's phone (and Ai) can interface with things most phones wouldn't be able to. N-No, I totally didn't get the first Twitter ad relevant to my interests in over 9 years on the site and copy the idea to fit Zach's hacker phone...
The outline on the "No Background" version of the text box and its text are now more legible as its outline is 87.5% opaque instead of 75% opaque.
The protagonist's name is now controlled by a variable. I'm kind of surprised I didn't do this before... No, I am not letting players change this at-will. I am maintaining a hardliner stance on this for story integrity reasons. I do some neat stuff with that this update!
A potential bug of loading a save weirdly from the dance game and reshowing the input prompt has been fixed.
I have actually fixed the scene with Zach kissing Britney in the changing room. I don't know how this broke on release, but I think the Ren'Py SDK functions slightly differently with call labels than compiled releases.
A few small issues with text substitution strings have been fixed here and there.
There's a new function that lets me change displayable (like sprites) in the middle of a text line much more easily. It's neat and lets things roll back and change without a stutter, although Ren'Py's weirdness means I can really only do it once a line because the {w} doesn't really work as intended anymore (its delay is way too long).
The order of the menu items has been shuffled slightly to move more important things closer to the top and less important things or potentially patron-exclusive things closer to the bottom.
For some insane reason, I made a few of the things in the game work better with self-voicing... nobody should ever press the V button on their keyboard while the Ren'Py window is active unless you want funny things to happen.
Zoey now has her extremely complicated beach outfit in the game from Myumi. I tested it pretty thoroughly, but it has variants for being wet, various states of undress, compatibility for all the hairstyles, and the hairstyles changing depending on the hat being on or the hood being up.
The long straight hair from the Zoey's princess theater costume outfit is in the game (but not the costume itself, as I am behind already). This is also from Myumi.
All of Zoey's sunglasses now work properly for gloom layers.
The hair colors and eye colors now load properly upon loading a save in pretty much any situation I can think of them mattering.
I redid Ryouichi's sprites, largely with getting his eyes closer to Keisuke's style by making the eye socket ridges look less harsh and shaded. It's honestly a huge improvement, even if it did take too much work because his artist didn't properly separate the layers.
Keisuke now has a few more emote layers.
The sprite expression grabber function now works for both Keisuke and Ryouichi, the latter who now has a sprite viewer page. Remember, these are really features for me to quickly test expressions as I code, but I leave them for you all.
I redid the file structure of the story scripts to make more sense for long-term and far-in-the-future expansion. There might be conflicting issues for itch.io users with old .rpyc files that were compiled on the user's end, so just delete those if the game has issues. This is actually the first release I am almost 100% positive is going to break most legacy saves, so everything is unlocked on the story jump menu and the version is 0.12.0 instead of the planned 0.11.1.
The story jump menu options (after you make a selection of where you are jumping) have been cleaned up a bit to make the selections more clear.
A lot of typo fixes here and there.
There's now a survey about what you think about re:/Dreamer in the placeholder (end of content) screen. Please fill it out if you have the time.
Something... big, but secret. If you know, you know.

0.11.0:
Happy third anniversary, re:/Dreamer (and happy 29th birthday to me, CaptainCaption!)
Zach finally has his day in the sun with a new intro. About 40-60 minutes long (more on the "about" in a bit), the last day in his life before he found re/Dreamer. I think the writing slaps as it sets a ton of the tone for the game, gives great foreshadowing, and really provides context that Zoey isn't just some girl who says she is a guy as it provides visible context of who that guy was. I can understand that not everyone will want this introductory day to Zach's new life to be as long as it is (for reasons other than wanting to more more easily self-insert as the excessively detailed protagonist of this visual novel) which is why it gets shorter (particularly the lectures) if Awkwardness is the default value of 3 or below. C.H.E.A.T.S., by strict canon, is not supposed to exist yet, but I am bending my rules a bit to make this game more enjoyable for more people.
The writing and expressions from the end of the transformation to the choice menu that can lead to the first bad end has been polished. This largely meant making the expressions match the quality standards set from the middle of the Britney mall date and beyond, but a few lines have been altered; most notably, Ai first looks up her player on his phone (she had previously just known his name) and realizes that the woman in front of her doesn't match that man, and she starts to piece things together from that.
The first masturbation scene in Zach's dorm room has been adjusted and expanded so that Zach finds a thick permanent marker to help him as he doesn't have enough knowledge for his hands alone to do the job. This has the benefit of making the focus for Zach's inability to climax in Keisuke's dorm room being that he was using his bare hands. I'll be getting to that scene soon, once the last of the CGs for the alternatives to the sex scene come in.
The bad ends have been polished with some cool new graphics and better expressions.
The explanation by Zach to Molly and Patrick can now be done fully in one loop with the maximum starting points because I changed a few of the penalty points to allow for it.
The "Stratus" thing with re:/Dreamer having a social media component has been removed since it added nothing to the game and was an old plot point. There's now just a generic player profile thing that Ai uses, with the implication that she can only call her player by the name on that profile.
C.H.E.A.T.S. is explained more clearly to players new to it on its screen and in the story with Zach at the character creator.
I changed the name of Zach's primary gacha from "Steel Blue Sky Corridor" to just "Steel Blue Sky" as it's less wordy. Also, the game actually has a screen based on Azur Lane's old 2019 user interface. I have to resist calling the game "Azur Plane" after someone mentioned the pun...
The arcade games, quick menu on the main dialogue window, and C.H.E.A.T.S. screen now highlight and work properly with controller and keyboard (minus Zone of the Zombies 2, where Zach blames his light gun for not firing a single shot). The C.H.E.A.T.S. bars (all the bars, in fact) the still require you to press the enter key or A button to select, but it works. Honestly, Ren'Py is not very pleasant to navigate with just a controller, but there's really not much I or Espeon can do about it.
A potential bug with Zoey hovering in the Britney Day 2 clothing store changing room has been fixed. I wasn't able to replicate a user reporting the issue, but Zoey's sprite has been hardcoded to be in the right position there.
Some minor polish to the expressions in the Keisuke route (mostly in the konbini). I'm saving the expressions overhaul in the route for when I get all of the Keisuke dorm room HCGs, but fixing a minor issue led to me doing some ahead of time.
Except on the title screen, you now have to unlock viewing every character in the sprite viewer by reading to certain points in the story (or jumping past them in the story jump menu). This sort of keeps characters, mainly Zoey, a surprise... but let's be honest: you likely know what you're getting into if you download this game.
There's now a variable tracking the route you are currently on. This will be used for common overlapping events later, like Zach's classes.
The World Information alert bar now works with sub-entries and clicking on it no longer advances to the next line (meaning that you're free to check the information in the moment it becomes relevant without a consequence of the story moving past that). The alert bar also shows for 6 seconds instead of 3, but it disappears at the next line of dialogue as usual.
Zach's sabbatical (and a few other World Information entries) now have fancy stock photos that cost a lot of money. They break up things so they're not just a wall of text.
I changed the expressions in Zach's sprites slightly. Most of this was making some lines less harsh and changing the order of the faces to make more sense (at least to me) of what Zoey parts they were based on, but mouth_0 is now Zoey's mouth_11 because it works a lot better as a neutral face than the slight frown it was.
Ai's sprite code has completely changed to allow a non-insane way of dealing with what direction she is facing. You can also make her background pink!

0.10.9

Zach, the main character of this story, is a chronic underachiever who has been using his above-average intellect to coast through life with below-average grades. After a gap year taken to find his identity and expand his spiritual horizons that left his broke, he's now a freshman university student in a major he only chose because it's easy and can lead to a steady job right out of school. He spends his idle time searching for new and obscure phone games to play as F2P user on a broke college student lifestyle.

Ai is the unreliable and mischievous A.I. that came with Zach’s copy of re: Dreamer. She seems to treat this all as one big game, though it probably is just that for her. Ai appears to have her head in the gutter 24/7 and seems to take great pleasure in teasing Zach. It remains to be seen if Zach can trust her.

Britney is a dorky young-adult blonde white girl and anime/game/cosplay otaku who is quite attractive but abrasive if you can't keep up with her pace. She and Zach met in high school and bonded over their similar taste in anime and mobage. She is also Zach's only female friend.

Keisuke is Zach's childhood friend and neighbor. Despite being opposites, the two have been best friends since they were little kids. He's an athletic prodigy and social butterfly who gets along well with the ladies, despite being a blunt meathead. Though their personalities have diverged since they were kids, they've known each other for a very long time and have a strong bond of trust.

0.10.8 (created 07/31/2022) (Current Public):
New writing with Zach in the theater meeting his crewmate and disassembling a theater set with him. Much like Zach's gender identity, you have to tear something down before you can rebuild it. I'm pretty happy with the pace of this writing, even if I spent a bit too long on the audio design.
I polished up a few of Zoey's expressions in the post-transformation scene before Zach meets Ai to meet modern standards and added a few nice details.
A few typo fixes in the theater introduction scene with Molly. I say "typos" but it was more refining the intentional Scottish typos that existed.
Molly and Patrick O'Brien's relationship has been clarified to "half-siblings." I had mistakenly used "step siblings" before, not realizing that doesn't give a blood relation.
Made the text for the World Info entries 25% bigger as I got some complaints about the readability on smaller monitors.
Fixed a broken animation in the intro sequence (Zach pulling himself off the floor) that a new version of Ren'Py broke.
Fixed one of the sunglasses of the Causal C outfit in Pose B not working properly.
Fixed Zoey's teardrops being over her hair. He sweat drops have to go over her hair or else the drops on her cheek are covered up, but I never corrected for the tear drops needing the opposite.
Something likely broke in the sprite viewer export with this same Ren'Py update or even earlier, but it's fixed now.
Espeon made the sprite viewer easier to use for Britney, Keisuke, and Ai.
Some of Ai's sprite code got changed in preparation of making her easier to work with. Also, she now has pink phone background options.
Espeon has added the groundwork for a notification system for when your C.H.E.A.T.S. stats and a few other variables are checked. I haven't added it into the game because I need to make the GUI for it, but it's there.

0.10.7 (created 06/26/2022) (Current Public):
New writing with Britney introducing Zach to part of her theater department on Friday of Week 2.
The text substitution system had a robust test with the names for the theater members. As Awkwardness increases, Zach buys more into Britney's eccentric theater director's nickname games.
Britney, Keisuke, and Ai now work in the sprite viewer, although not quite to the insane detail of Zoey. Of the three, Britney has the most features.
There's a new casual outfit as a choice between it and the existing eggshell white turtleneck sweater and women's jeans outfit for Zoey to wear as her "default" outfit in the Keisuke route. It looks really, really cool, and has options for a choker, bracelets, and several colors of sunglasses.
There's also a new compression bra outfit. It works so well that it's less realistic than the entire premise of re:Dreamer.
I added a new variant of the tracksuit for the Zoey sprites I made based on the tracksuit from the placeholder Keisuke Mirror HCGs (I also added a related green version of the big hoodie and two new expressions by transposing them from CGs TiltSHIFT drew!)
Finally got rid of the ICC profiles on the backgrounds and made the color depth 24 bits (meaning that there's no alpha channel like a 32-bit image). I'm surprised it took me this long to remember to do that...
Fixed the school colors reverting to default values inside the sprite viewer if no changes were saved.
A few typo fixes here and there.

0.10.6 (created 06/11/2022) (Current Public):
New Keisuke writing with more exercising, this time at the campus fitness center with stationary bicycles. Not to dislocate my shoulder patting myself on the back or anything, but I quite like the writing here and thought I did a few clever things with it.
Espeon added a new system for text substitution based on variables like the C.H.E.A.T.S. stats that is a lot better than anything else I came up with. I didn't get much of a chance to get into tinkering with it and adding all the stuff I want to it, but it is in the game in a few places.

0.10.5 (created 05/15/2022) (Current Public):
A sizable new Texas BBQ lunch date scene with Britney! This ended up being a lot longer than I expected at just under 6,500 words of dialogue, which should translate to about 26 minutes of reading. Unlike a number of the previous updates, this one focuses on the basics: a straightforward story with little in the way of major C.H.E.A.T.S variants. I also had an incredible amount of fun writing Britney being a prideful goofball, and I think that shows up well in the writing.
Fixed the Keisuke sprites breaking with sweat drops in his side-profile "D" pose.
Fixed Britney tauntingly calling Zach "Zach" when it should have been "Zoey" in a few places.
Fixed the patron passwords system being a little finicky with loading older saves or inputting a password on a save that lacked it.

0.10.4 (05/15/2022) (Current Public):
Finishing the jogging scene with Keisuke. This is one of 3 (technically 4) exercise scenes with Keisuke. Each exercise has an option to decide Zach's attitude towards it (either "Eager," "Reluctant," or "Lethargic"); the average mood influences Keisuke's opinion of Zach and potentially Zach's stamina for sex and a slightly smaller chest size down the road (I'll have to look more into the complexity of each, but the idea is that being enthusiastic about exercise makes Zach last longer in bed and burns some of his fat away).
There's a new succinct code system for C.H.E.A.T.S. variants within text line that should hopefully streamline some of the writing for that.
Lots of little fixes behind the scenes to Britney's content, and a few continuity corrections (most importantly, explaining the differences between Zach's pants when meeting Britney vs going to Keisuke's dorm room).
Fixed an annoying bug on Android that made Dance Uprising in the Britney arcade date unresponsive.

0.10.3

Zach, the main character of this story, is a chronic underachiever who has been using his above-average intellect to coast through life with below-average grades. After a gap year taken to find his identity and expand his spiritual horizons that left his broke, he's now a freshman university student in a major he only chose because it's easy and can lead to a steady job right out of school. He spends his idle time searching for new and obscure phone games to play as F2P user on a broke college student lifestyle.

Ai is the unreliable and mischievous A.I. that came with Zach’s copy of re: Dreamer. She seems to treat this all as one big game, though it probably is just that for her. Ai appears to have her head in the gutter 24/7 and seems to take great pleasure in teasing Zach. It remains to be seen if Zach can trust her.

Britney is a dorky young-adult blonde white girl and anime/game/cosplay otaku who is quite attractive but abrasive if you can't keep up with her pace. She and Zach met in high school and bonded over their similar taste in anime and mobage. She is also Zach's only female friend.

Keisuke is Zach's childhood friend and neighbor. Despite being opposites, the two have been best friends since they were little kids. He's an athletic prodigy and social butterfly who gets along well with the ladies, despite being a blunt meathead. Though their personalities have diverged since they were kids, they've known each other for a very long time and have a strong bond of trust.

0.10.2 (04/15/2022) (Current Public):
New writing of Zach presenting a plagiarized project from his mom in the Freshman Engineering seminar.
The preceding computer lab scene has been edited for better expressions and wording, and Zach's mom's plagiarized project has changed from a boring art museum to a cool space rocket.
There is an option to pay attention to the lengthy PSYC 100 lecture (Day 4 Keisuke after lunch) on the differences between men and women when it comes to sex and attraction while Zach comments to himself on some of the lecture. Given that one of the strong themes of Keisuke's route is the difference between men and women, I think it fits well, and it should be easy to follow along with despite its academic nature.
The sprite export now exports with proper transparency and with a resized window (although 1920x1080 export is suggested for the best quality). Thanks to ethylene for the idea that ultimately made this work!
The "casual_c" outfit on the third day of Keisuke's route no longer has a messed-up lower arm in the A pose.
Zoey has a new companion outfit to the current casual_a outfit, which adds the coat from the CG/HCGs from a visual novel that uses a very, very similar outfit and that is the source of the placeholder CGs/HCGs, Zannen na Ane to no Love Comedy.
The "Art" folder has been removed as it bloated what is already a 1 GB download by over 300 MB. I need time to think about how sharing fan art and distributing it will happen in the future.

0.10.1 (04/01/2022) (Current Public):
A lot of edits to the writing and sprite expressions in Keisuke's route, particularly the second half of the Day 1 Ryouichi appearances, the Day 2 mall scene (after the lunch), Day 3's morning, and Day 3's party.
Lyra, resident re:Dreamer server goblin, has graciously gone through the script and given me more typos to fix. Thanks a ton! :^)
Zoey has a stunning new female school uniform outfit. It's not going to be used much (if at all) in the current routes, but it'll be something Zoey wears a ton in the Rich route as that route involves her publicly presenting as a woman the whole route; however, the skirt can be combined with other tops to make new outfits, like the sweater you can see in the drunk dream sequence if Transis set to 4 or higher.
I made the Zoey hair and eyes colors store between saves. Did you ever want to make your pink-haired Zoey save with girly-girl C.H.E.A.T.S. stats separate from your redhead Zoey with girlboss C.H.E.A.T.S. stats? Now you can! She also now has an option for green hair and brown eyes (like Gavial from Arknights, because I love cool women).
I made a new expression for Zoey because I saw a cute anime girl pouting. The reference image for the expression came from a Pokemon gijinka of all things (Twitter or pixiv, 7th image).
Ryouichi is fully back in the game with his sprites.
The Zoey sprites are simpler in file structure and now crop and composite the legs instead of having them as premade images, reducing file size.
The Keisuke sprites have been edited to have modular expressions like the Ai, Britney, and Zoey sprites; also, the Ai, Britney and Keisuke sprites now only support modular expressions. My macropad that fills in expressions for me is going to see a lot more use from now on.
The sprite viewer now no longer gets "stuck" if you enter it without custom mode being off while a custom outfit is being worn (or vice-versa), simply because I have made the screen's custom mode always default to being off in complied releases until the user toggles it back within the screen.
The sprite viewer now loads the currently shown Zoey expression upon entering and has a lot of neat code to help make sure that things won't break.
The options for custom expressions are now staggered so that it's easier to see what a default expression. Previously, some expression parts had variants that misaligned things, but now "Eyes_X Eyebrows_X Mouth_X" will always show up on the same row.
The sprite viewer now takes cropped screenshots of our favorite Picrew character. I tried really hard to get the exported images transparent, but Ren'Py does not support pygame anymore, meaning that it can't use pygame.image in any meaningful way to save a PNG32 file (i.e., by converting it to a string buffer and then into a Surface that I can export with pygame.image.save(); making a bytes screenshot with renpy.screenshot_to_bytes(), applying im.AlphaMask() made from the currently showing sprite with a red overlay color, and using pygame.image.frombuffer() to get a Surface that I can export with pygame.image.save()). If you were wondering, attempting to import pygame 2 breaks Ren'Py completely, even when importing 'as' something else, and I have better things to work on with this game than banging my head on a wall to perfect a feature that likely won't be used very much.
Starting with 0.10.1, Backer patrons will get a separate password with each release that gives them access on-the-fly C.H.E.A.T.S. adjustments and the full story jump menu to zip to content faster. Sustainers will still have saving Zoey's customized appearance in the sprite editor for in-game use and the developer commentary exclusive to their tier.
The "Route Jump" button has been renamed "Story Jump" and the "About" screen clarifies things related to the patron perks since I've had a lot of people asking me question about the tiers in the past few months.

0.10.0 (03/18/2022) (Current Public):
After over 4 months, the wait is finally over! The arcade date in Britney's route is here with over a hundred branching C.H.E.A.T.S. paths, 4 games to choose from, and a handful of significant story variants based on the games' outcomes. There's a lot to do and see here, making the content highly replayable (if you'll forgive the pun).
I included some test Zoey sprites with alternative breast sizes inside the Art folder (formerly Fan Art). The results were achieved from editing the existing breasts with Clip Studio Paint's curved surface distortion tool. While the results aren't as good as properly drawn sprites, please let me know which one is your favorite because some of these alternative breast sizes might be showing up in a future story event.
That "Art" folder has been expanded to include some RD memes made over the years and never-before-seen variations of the official art. God, this game sounds so professional when I say that.
Zoey now has new outfits of a wet nude outfit that shows up in the Keisuke baths scene , a one-piece competition swimsuit (in 3 colors; pink, purple, and red, with wet variations and optional thigh garters), an oversized men's XL hoodie (in 2 colors; purple and red), a women's tracksuit (in 2 colors; purple and red), loose/tight sarashi chest bindings, and male school uniform variations with the loose variant.
Added silver hair and gray eyes options to Zoey's sprites. Like the other colors, they will show up in the Britney chest measuring CG if chosen.
I forgot that when I modularized the Zoey sprites facial expressions, the layers that make up blush 05 were included in almost every expression. That is now the default blush for the Zoey sprites, and it makes her face slightly warmer.
Zach is now called either "Zach," "Zoey," or "Z" by Britney based on an internal variable that should be easier to deal with than a bunch of if/else statements.
Zach's pronouns are now internally tracked (being either masculine, feminine, or epicene). They are currently only used for what Britney uses for Zach rather than his own preference, but it's important groundwork for later.
I finally made "...{wait}TEXT" the consistent use of ellipses at the start of a line of dialogue across the entire script instead of "{wait}...TEXT" (I'm surprised I hadn't done this already).
Standardized the trembling animations.
I realized that not only can Transitions be used simultaneously with text being displayed on screen, but the vpunch and hpunch effects are actually 0.275 seconds in duration as opposed to the 0.25 I had assumed they were based on the official documentation. The former means that led to some slightly off animations, so I just made custom code to make the animations work properly.
The end of the shorter Britney stub (Just ask her to come to your room) not only tells you that you're on a short stub but gives you a hyperlink to click to instantly go back to the start of the longer path.
There's now a route jump menu to the Keisuke Day 1 Mirror Self-Voyeurism scene. I kind of forgot how much I liked the writing there.
I got around to un-commenting as many of my inline comments as I can that aren't major spoilers and making them show up as Author's Note asides. This was going to be tied to Awkwardness being set to 5 because that is already kind of the reader accepting additional verbosity and weird things, but it is now its own Patron-exclusive menu option.
There is now a short text blurb that shows up when you start the game for the first time that suggests playing it with the audio on because I've been asked if muting the audio subtracts from the experience a few times, which it most definitely does. I also put a lot of effort into re:/Dreamer's sound design and want to show it off (can you even do that with audio since you hear it?)
The dream sequence after the Haze rescue has been punched-up with proper care for the expressions and some rewrites here and there.
Polished up a good amount of the expressions in the Alone route.
Polished up *some* of the Zoey sprite expressions in Keisuke's route. Pretty much everything needs proper attention to get to the expressions to the level of quality they have in Britney's route, but for now, only a few of the baths scene expressions and party expressions have been spruced up.
A lot of spelling and grammar mistakes have been fixed in the script thanks to Ethylene.
Fixed the loose left arm of the Pose A lifted shirt sometimes not showing up; also, the lifted shirts now show the loose left arm properly in another way by putting it behind the chest so that it doesn't interfere with the tall men's jeans.
Fixed the Keisuke baths sex, as the path with lower Horniness had always led to rougher sex, when the option to give full consent should have led to gentler sex.
Lastly, some special credits and thank-yous to...
Mia of the re:/Dreamer Discord for making the Dance Uprising arrows and testing the game with her rhythm god gamer skills, making it not garbage and setting impressed high score benchmarks to beat. She wants me to say she has a ko-fi and that she is starving, so please send her ration money.
Ethylene of the re:/Dreamer Discord server for her proofreading prowess, which means an embarrassing amount of spelling and grammar mistakes in the game text have been corrected.
The following for the code starting points for the 0.9.3 Britney Day 2 Arcade Date minigames:
Dance Uprising: RuolinZheng08's renpy-rhythm.
Tower Topper: sDextra's Tetris.
Zone of the Zombies 2: ColoradoStark's Renpy_Shooter.
And all the readers for being patient for this release.

v0.9.2

Zach, the main character of this story, is a chronic underachiever who has been using his above-average intellect to coast through life with below-average grades. After a gap year taken to find his identity and expand his spiritual horizons that left his broke, he's now a freshman university student in a major he only chose because it's easy and can lead to a steady job right out of school. He spends his idle time searching for new and obscure phone games to play as F2P user on a broke college student lifestyle.

Ai is the unreliable and mischievous A.I. that came with Zach’s copy of re: Dreamer. She seems to treat this all as one big game, though it probably is just that for her. Ai appears to have her head in the gutter 24/7 and seems to take great pleasure in teasing Zach. It remains to be seen if Zach can trust her.

Britney is a dorky young-adult blonde white girl and anime/game/cosplay otaku who is quite attractive but abrasive if you can't keep up with her pace. She and Zach met in high school and bonded over their similar taste in anime and mobage. She is also Zach's only female friend.

Keisuke is Zach's childhood friend and neighbor. Despite being opposites, the two have been best friends since they were little kids. He's an athletic prodigy and social butterfly who gets along well with the ladies, despite being a blunt meathead. Though their personalities have diverged since they were kids, they've known each other for a very long time and have a strong bond of trust.

0.9.1 (11/02/2021) (Current Public):
A short bit of new Britney content for the Day 2 mall date.
Zoey now has fully drawn expression and blushes in the measuring CG custom-drawn for the scene instead of my blurry mesh transforms of the sprite expressions. The non-red eyes have also been adjusted since I didn't realized TiltSHIFT used a reddish layer for the eye darkening instead of a black one.
A small fix for the one line of dialogue an NSFW HCG sex scene was shown on screen.
The "Totally Not Azur Lane Taihou Race Queen by PSI" image(s) in the Fan Art folder of each game are now the full-sized versions instead of a downscaled version since the those files were recently made public posts on the game's Patreon.

0.9.0 (10/16/2021) (CURRENT PUBLIC):
Happy second anniversary re:/Dreamer! To celebrate, this version is becoming public immediately with a brand-new and fully unlocked Zoey sprite viewer, sprite editor, route jump menu, and C.H.E.A.T.S. menu. Next release, things will go back to normal with the versions being staggered with extra content for Sustainer patrons, such as being able to save their changes to the Zoey sprites to carry them over in-game (although access to the sprite viewer will always be free and public).
New story content with new CG art of Britney measuring Zach's sizable chest.
Fixed an issue where the very first CG of the game (Zach on his dorm room bed) wouldn't load under certain circumstances (mainly, low system memory).
Fixed an issue where Zach's phone raising animation might get interrupted and never show up on screen.
I'm experimenting with a thing where Awkward being set to 5 brings out a few developer comments in some sections. Let me know if you like it or hate it.
Several tiny fixes to Zoey's sprites.

0.8.10 (10/01/2021):
New content in the Britney x Zach mall date where Britney explains why it's impossible for Zach to take her on the worst date of her life.
I apparently broke the 0.8.9 content by failing to specify Zoey's sprite pose at one spot? I never had the issue within either the Ren'Py SDK or the compiled Windows release, but some people reported the issue. Either way, it's been fixed and the scene has forced screen locations for Zoey's sprites.
Some of the audio files have been trimmed to cut down on the distribution size of the game. I need to trim the audio files for the full soundtrack eventually but that's quite far back on the to-do list.
The end of the underdeveloped "Just ask her to come to your room." path in Britney's route now lets you know that the other path has significantly more content.
Some edits here and there (mostly light phrasing edits to the first half of the Britney date).

0.8.9 (09/17/2021):
Britney has made it to day 2!!! Admittedly, I shot past because the Day 1 late night scene of Britney measuring Zach doesn't have the final art and I don't want to waste time working on this game by redo writing or making the CGs game-ready a second time (although you can see the cleaned sketches and final outlines of that scene inside the "Fan Art" folder).
Anyways, the scene (which has plenty of C.H.E.A.T.S. and bPoints variants) covers Zach and Britney going on their first "date," posting proof of their relationship on social media, Zach complaining about Britney's attempt at a chest binder and coming up with an idea on how to fix it, and a surprise guest (and yes, her lines over the phone are supposed to be blank at one point, but a clever reader can find a way to read what she's saying). Also, that's not the only easter egg. Try a C.H.E.A.T.S. setting of 4-5, X, X, 4-5, X, 4-5 (with X being any value and the hyphen indicating a range) for a neat bit of dialogue at the end of the new content.
Zach has a fancy new phone app. I need to actually make this more interactive, but it looks pretty nice (minus the font, which is intentionally meant to give "girl who just got an Android and replaced the font with a handwritten one" vibes).
Since the old Bad Ending 3 was cut out in 0.8.0, I forgot to rename Bad Ending 4 to take its place, leading to some confusion. That's been fixed now.
The History screen now scrolls to the bottom of list so you no longer have to scroll down the entire screen to check something from a line or two ago. Shoutouts to cobaltcore for helping the diagnosis. For those curious, Ren'Py's game_menu screen scrolls down to the bottom if scroll == "vpgrid" but not if scroll == "viewport", the history screen uses the former when each list entry in the history screen is given a specific height (like Student Transfer does) but it uses the latter when no height is given and the screen is generated dynamically (like re:/Dreamer does).
Zach's hair is now properly set to the "loose" hairstyle for the content jump menu to the Day 1 Alone masturbation scene.
Zach's phone battery indicator is no longer always green if the phone is charging. I misremembered how that worked on older iOS versions.
It didn't matter until this update, but Zoey's "fit" solo male uniform's dress shirt sprite was broken in the "b" pose (I had used the C pose's mask for the arms and it lead to a noticeable gap).
A few random typos and weirdly phrased sentences have been fixed (most noticeably I kept writing 'conbini' instead of 'konbini' despite knowing full well that's not how romaji works).

0.8.8 (09/03/2021):
In a new branch of writing, Zach can now let Britney go first with explaining what how Zach can help get her parents off her back during their dining hall conversation. The conversations will change slightly depending on their order, but Britney will appreciate that you let her go first and will remember that option if you pick it.
There's some extremely significant backstory given about Britney and Zach's families in this update. I'm playing my cards close to my chest on this one, but this dialogue is important (and not just because it's another piece of the puzzle for why Zach is the way he is).
Zach's explanation about what re:/Dreamer is was slightly edited to fit together with the variable conversation order and to make some of the more stilted lines flow more naturally. It wasn't anything major, but it should be a bit more readable now.
From the feedback from some players, I edited a few of Zach's behaviors towards Britney to be a bit more "trans girl-ish" should the Trans stats be higher or if Zach answered that he probably was a trans woman in denial during Ai's therapy session. Keisuke's route is later going to get the same treatment, but I really don't want to my gears back to his route and instead want to focus entirely on Britney's (at least until they have an equal amount of content).
I forgot to put in a check in Keisuke Day 2 morning's explanation about re:/Dreamer that accounted for whether or not Zach claimed to have memory loss about re:/Dreamer with Ai (or, as it is now, if Ai suggested to Zach that he had memory loss). I know I literally just typed that I didn't want to switch gears back to Keisuke yet, but this was a potential plot hole that needed resolving.
Many other very minor edits to Britney's route as I polished up lines here and there.
The window can now be resized again! Since I move things around my screen often during development and need pixel-perfect display of the game for checking assets, I have a developer setting enabled that turns off dragging the window to resize it. I left the code for that out of the compiled game via the Ren'Py build options so that should have been set back to being enabled, but I never actually checked that it worked. It didn't, meaning it was still impossible to resize in releases. Now I have it working based on detecting if Ren'Py is running out of a release with 'config.developer = "auto"' (the same thing preventing people from just pressing Shift+D to access the developer tools); if it's running in anything besides the Ren'Py SDK, the window can be resized normally. I'm sure this is going to cause a lot of confusion for Espeon and I fully expect her to grumble at me someday about how this makes her life more difficult, but it works perfectly for my purposes lol :^)
Zach's phone battery indicator now has a tiny little lightning bolt and turns green to show when it's plugged in and charging.
Ai's ahaha.wav laugh has been moved to the voices audio channel, meaning that you can turn it off if it bothers you.

0.8.7 (08/21/2021):
LOTS of new Britney writing. Seriously, I haven't had the writing demon possess me like this since 0.2.2 back in February 2020.
The Zach to Zoey transformation CG has been updated with final versions of the hands, shoulders, and Adam's apple TFs.

0.8.6 (08/08/2021):
Britney has new writing after the sex scene. It's a bit short given that this dev cycle was only a week and I'm on new Parkinson's medications I'm getting used to, but it's building up for Zach going girlmode and eating dinner with Britney.
The campus commons area dining hall background from Keisuke Day 4 has been replaced so that it can be used as Zach's dorm room dining hall background.
The "cute" and "sexy" Keisuke Day 2 mall underwear have been swapped. The black one with purple lace is now "sexy" and the pink one with white lace is now "cute" (there's also a little graphic showing which is which in the content jump menu). Yes, I know pose A has smaller breasts than poses B and C.
The underlying Ren'Py engine is back on the latest version once again as the issues with rollback have been fixed.
Added a text document to the game folder detailing how to fix the relatively common problem of the game not launching properly due to Ren'Py's new graphical renderer settings as well as showing what to do if other errors pop up.

0.8.5 (08/01/2021) (CURRENT BACKER PATRON):
Britney's sprites are 100% completed!!! With 3 poses, 6 outfits, 2 hairstyles, 18 expressions, and plenty of accessories, she's looking cute as hell in her full set. Myumi is likely going to be contacted to give her a bikini *eventually,* but I'm really satisfied with her range at the moment. Still, if anyone wants to see her wearing something specific, Sustainers can use a request for an outfit of some kind...
New cleaned line art for Zach's transformation into Zoey is in. This is the 5th major step of 9, and features Zach's hands shrinking, his shoulders slimming, and his Adam's apple disappearing. It's a bit roughly implemented at the moment due to Britney's new art and writing taking focus priority, but all the major variants are here.
There is new content after the sex scene in Britney's route where Zach and Britney tentatively plan what to do for the rest of the evening. As a warning, this scene is VERY short if Zach's Emotionality C.H.E.A.T.S. value or his bPoints value are low.
The script finally got parsed for spelling and grammar errors! While it's only for the Alone branch contents (everything before the choice of friend, White Girl Wasted, and Drunk Dream), it improves the script rather nicely and makes it look like it was typed by a middle schooler just a tiny bit less. Still, MS Word did most of the heavy lifting for these checks, so if anything is still wrong, report it in the #bugs-and-typos-reports channel in the game's Discord server (https://discord.gg/vjEUvZU).
This means that there are countless tiny edits to the script, but some edits were also made to a plot point mentioned in the Alone route to not contradict something in Keisuke's route or the content planned for 0.8.6. Remember, it's not a retcon if the game isn't out of alpha yet!
Britney's "Just ask her to come to your room" route got minor edits and expansions to make Britney more callous towards Zach if he more openly manipulated her into helping him.
Britney's "Try to tell her the details over text" route got minor edits and expansions before the measuring scene to make Britney more confident in asserting the normally obvious fact that a man can't suddenly turn into a woman.
Working Britney's new pose into the script resulted in some minor edits here and there to fit her body language.
There was apparently an issue where the World Info entry screens would break? I never had it happen to me, but Espeon fixed it.
Fixed a few broken F. Skip jumps.
The Ren'Py version has been downgraded to 7.4.4 because the new release had some issues with the phone system on rollback (Ren'Py Tom, the lead dev of the engine, is aware of the rollback issues and is fixing them). Also, for some users on older hardware, an issue where the game was not launching properly due to Ren'Py's new graphical renderer settings should cease to exist (but please folks, update to OpenGL 3 or greater).
Britney's b pose glasses fit her face slightly better (I had left an overhanging shadow on them that made them look odd if you looked closely).

0.8.4 (07/13/2021) (CURRENT PUBLIC):
The conclusion of the Zach and Britney lesbian sex scene. Nice. :^)
Britney has her second pose (out of a total of three) added into the game with minor edits all throughout her route to make good use of it. God bless Myumi for returning from the dead to finish it.
Moderate edits to the "Ask her over" to build the framework for adding bPoints and a few other things that will be relevant to the story of Britney's route later.
Zach's butt expansion TF is fully in-game with its final versions.
Not that anyone noticed since it hasn't shown up in the game story yet, but Britney's female school uniform outfit has been modified to better match the male school uniform you see Zach wear. You'll find it (and the original) in the Fan Art folder. Reminder that I'm disturbingly good at editing art. :^)
The artists text file in the Fan Art folder has been updated to actually show in-game artists and their social media links. I even added the concept artists for Zoey!
Thanks to Espeon, C.H.E.A.T.S. values now load from saves, meaning that you can have multiple save files with multiple C.H.E.A.T.S. settings that remain internally different.
The save and load screens now show the C.H.E.A.T.S. values of these saves.
"Aloofness" has been renamed to "Awkwardness" since it is a much better name for the stat. Yes, I don't know why I wasn't using this in the first place...
The zphone and layeredimage files are now properly archived in the release instead of being lose files.
Fixed an issue where holding down Ctrl or otherwise rapidly text would cause Zach's phone to never finish its raising animation.

0.8.3 (07/01/2021) (CURRENT PUBLIC):
Zach's finally drawn in-game! He's an adorable little man!
Zach's butt expansion cleaned sketches are in-game. :eyes:
Ryouichi is back! He's not fully reimplemented back into the script yet but he's large and looking good with a bit of new writing to reintroduce him.
More World Information entries have been added, and they return to the main menu screen instead of being tucked away behind "Extras". Also, the list of main menu items has been reordered in a way that I find to be a bit more logical.
The clickbar for World Information entries has been reenabled.
The higher Aloofness Day 1 therapy session tangent with Ai bringing up the DSM-5 and lying through her teeth about things to bolster her argument against Zach has been cut out, partly because it was long-winded with no real point, partly because a few readers got the wrong impression of Ai telling the truth.
The prompt about automatic interruptions and the option to either leave them enabled or to disable them has been re-added to the start of a brand new game launch (thanks to Skiegh aka Trigger for pointing out that many new players won't discover this option on their own!).
Yen conversion rate has been adjusted from about 110 JPY = 1 USD to about 100 JPY = 1 USD.
C.H.E.A.T.S. variables are now 1-5 based within the game code instead of 0-4.
Made the no textbox text variant have a thicker outline so it's more legible.
The phone now (somewhat) automatically adjusts its position. I might have broken something horribly with this so please scream at me to fix it if I did.
A few visual glitches have been fixed.
I forgot to flip a variable in the 0.8.2 Britney sex scene. Zach is now more easily able to be aware of what Britney is about to do and freak out over it.

0.8.2 (06/22/2021) (CURRENT PUBLIC):
Britney has an expansive new scene where she and Zach has sex. It has multiple branches with different contents depending on bPoints (aka the flags you raise with Britney by doing stuff she likes) and the C.H.E.A.T.S. stats. Essentially, more bPoints = more romance focus with Britney.
The phone screen got yet another overhaul. Behind the scenes, it's a fully modular layeredimage like a sprite where I can change the layout or any of the top elements (time, battery charge, etc.) on the top bar at any time and the screen of anime mobage app icons generated by AI CharacterMaker, but the real star of the show is the gorgeous new phone wallpaper drawn by PSI which debuted as Zach's phone wallpaper in re:/Dreamer 0.8.2 (and yes, PSI is taking commissions right now, but only SFW ones, which is a shame because if he was taking NSFW commissions Espeon and I would throw money at him in a heartbeat).
He was commissioned to do a totally-not-Azur-Lane-Taihou-Enrapture-Companion with Fate/EXTRA Nero's semi-official GOODSMILE RACING race queen outfit, and holy CRAP did he exceed all expectations. This anime mobage babe who looks strikingly similar to Zoey is posing on what is essentially a red Chevrolet Corvette C8 with a widebody mod, which I am headcanoning as Zach's preference in muscle cars (a cur nut friend was a bit mad that I didn't take his recommendation of a 1973 AMC Javelin which he owns, and another tried to recommend a Ferrari Enzo with Lamborghini Countach scissor doors and intakes specifically designed to give every Italian who looked at in a rage-induced stroke).
This wallpaper is available as a downscaled image in the Fan Art folder of the game for everyone, but patrons of every level have access to the full-resolution versions. I'm not saying it'll turn you into an anime girl if you use it as the wallpaper for your phone, but I'm also not not saying that.
You'll notice the phone battery and time change throughout scenes. This was calculated based on conversational English being 120-150 words per minute, the best guesses I could for Zach thinking things, and Ai draining Zach's phone battery by 1% every 3 minutes when she's on screen and 1% every 5-6 minutes when she isn't. Yes, this means that Zach's battery can drain from a full charge to 0 in as little as 3 hours, but this is by design. I want Zach to have to rely an external battery for mid-day charges which is a very easy way to guarantee Ai is out of commission and not monitoring him, and it also highlights the handicap that Ai has of being tied to his phone and forces her to play nice since Zach is essentially lugging around a pacemaker for her.
The in-game phone messaging has been partially overhauled with the top bar info, a new background, and adjusted slider bar colors. There's also a pink version in the game for when Ai needs to help Zach's disguise when he's presenting as Zoey in public (or if she just like fucking with him).
Ai's phone background has been adjusted slightly to work better with the top bar on the phone screen.
The Keisuke Day 3 party scene where Zach goes into a corner and plays on his phone has been slightly revamped to take into account Ai changing Zach's phone theme from blue to pink when he's in public as Zoey.
The Keisuke Day 2 morning scene where Zach uses a portable charger on his phone has been expanded a tiny bit to explain why Zach has such a high-capacity portable charger.
There's now a forced override option for the textbox to be transparent. It's only used in one place at the moment (the new Britney sex scene). I think this is the best option to show this scene without HCG. That being said, if you all yell at me loud enough, I will remove it because I know it looks kind of odd.
Fixed an issue with the changing room selfie breaking the script (I didn't account for the changed file structure of the new gloom bases).
Fixed the issue with the confirmation screen causing lag, especially when quitting the game. Nobody has ever complained about this so it might be an issue only present in the SDK.
The developer tools are now disabled on releases. Some lovely folks at F95zone have been trying to prove a point by leaking Sustainer passwords, so blame them. Sometime in the future, I'll be implementing a secret key combination on releases to access it, but for now it's locked.
The route jump menu now shows what's new in a release vs what's existing content that's been edited.

0.8.1 (05/28/2021) (CURRENT PUBLIC):
CHOO CHOO! ALL ABOARD THE YURI EXPRESS! Britney is finally getting new content after five months, and this train isn't stopping until she finishes the weekend with Zach. I've been doing the yuri crew, some of re:Dreamer's most diehard supporters, dirty with dangling her content in front of them but always going back to Keisuke, and I want to give her the love she so rightfully deserves.
On that note, Tara Mede's sustainer request was for a stronger romance focus in Britney's route. Expect to see some choices that will increase the romance focus with Britney throughout the route with checks that will be run on it similar to the C.H.E.A.T.S. stats, where some dialogue and events will change based on how high or low it is (while largely leaving the events the same). This is purely an additive to the romance, not a detractor. It tracks good opportunities Zach takes, not missed opportunities or things he messes up.
Anyways, Britney's new content is in the "Try to tell her the details over text" route and is a more lighthearted romp to show a growing romantic potential between Britney and Zach.
As the most recent Friday Update discussed, Zoey has 10 new expressions. Their implementation in the full game is very underutilized, but they make a strong appearance in the new 0.8.1 content and edits.
Zach's mom finally has a name! While next to nobody in the story is going to be calling her by it, I've settled on Samantha in her new World Info entry that unlocks in either the first day of Britney or Keisuke's route.
In that same vein, Britney finally has accurate official measurements! If you don't know, her artist, Myumi, upper her cup size from the small D she was listed at, much like TiltSHIFT upped Zoey's cup size from the DD/E she was listed at. Anyways, Britney's measurements are:
Height: 161cm/5'3.5" (half an inch taller than Zoey, half an inch shorter than Zach)
Weight: 54kg/119lbs
Bust-Waist-Hips: 91cm/36"-56cm/24"-87cm/34"
Cup: 77cm/31" underbust, so 32DD/E US, 32DD UK, 70F EU, and 75C JP/KR
There's been some confusion about the way content is gated between versions because the placeholder screen words itself in a way to imply that there's a Patreon paywall for more content than exists, so the placeholder screen has been updated to link to both the online changelog on TFGS and the route flowchart within the game folder so that readers can check. Some of you probably got here from that :^)
Fixed the variable phone transition not applying properly. The phone should no longer slide out from under itself.
0.8.0 (05/12/2021) (CURRENT PUBLIC):
The intro up to the friend choice has been completely redone, featuring a new transformation sequence with the sketches of the upcoming HCGs.
This lowers the script from 190,000 words to 160,000 words, but the cut portions were the rambling Ai vs Zach intro that people didn't like.
To that end, I've rebuilt the bundled route flowchart to be clearer and show the new content.
I still need to run the giant spell checker of the script I keep promising, but releasing this after more than month of delays takes priority.
Zach has a real phone now! It doesn't quite have the full functionality to it yet, but it's there and it looks pretty!
The Android installation is now just an APK. No more confusion!
Added an Android variant for the texting screen that makes the phone font bigger for better legibility on smaller screens (the irony of the nesting phone within a phone isn't lost on me).
I also finally remembered to update the Android config build version number from 500. From now on, it'll be updated to reflect the changed in versions.
The text message system is now slightly clearer and more legible; also, the sounds for texts being sent is automatically parsed.
Removed blank .png images and replaced them with Null displayables like a smart person
Fixed a sprite error after the Keisuke mirror sex scene where I forgot to declare the outfit as "t_shirt_lifted_nude_wet_male_jeans"; the "t_shirt_lifted_wet_male_jeans" it was declared as and its missing "nude" gave the game an aneurysm with no torso.
Remade the shower HCGs to have Zoey's black hair and Keisuke's darker skin. The final pose of the 4th HCG is a bit off still but I can only do so much without asking an artist to draw something, and TS is busy with more pressing HCG.
Fixes to the Zoey sprites pants bases.
Darkened the Zoey sprites B pose nipples to match the rest.
The History screen should now be working much much better, with showing italics for thoughts, Ai's unique text style, and more.
Minor fix to the Keisuke Day 1 conbini scene where Zach's drinking SFX came from the "Sounds" audio channel rather than the "Voices" audio channel, which may have resulted in unwanted end-user audio mixing.
Added Zach's answer to Kohaku's prodding about why this woman with an extremely feminine body was so bad at acting feminine to the content jump menu to avoid a potential issue with the Day 3 Party scene of the variable not being declared.
Changed C.H.E.A.T.S. values to be truly persistent (they previously could break on certain rollbacks).
Reconfigured Ai's font (Playtime With Hot Toddies) to use italic glyphs when applicable instead of Ren'Py's interpretation of italics.
Cleared out unused fonts and gathered all the licenses for the remaining fonts.
I changed the average frequency tone for Zoey's vocal SFX files to F#3 (190 Hz) which is what I calculated the fundamental frequency of the Vtuber Mori Calliope's voice and what my headcanon of Zoey's voice is. Mori speaks between D3 (144 Hz) and A#3 (233 Hz). When you consider that women have a fundamental frequency range of E3 (165 Hz) to C4 (255 Hz)or even higher depending on where you source, she has a shockingly deep voice. I'm using Mori's voice as a basic for Zoey's voice for 3 reasons:
1. The male fundamental frequency range is F2 (85 Hz) to F3 (180 Hz), and for the purposes of the story, this character needs to be able to vocally pass as either a male or a female. Slightly deepening a 190 Hz voice sounds like the effeminate male Zach was. When emotional, people speak in a higher pitch than their fundamental frequency, so raising a 190 Hz voice allows for cute girl gasps and giggles and such.
2. It's atypical for TG'd women to not sound like squeaky girls, so by giving Zoey a deeper voice that's more masculine that the norm for this genre, I'm actually making her more distinct
3. Deeper female voices make my knees go weak.
This is overall a rather subtle change but I think it adds a lot to the game.
0.7.1 (03/13/2021):
Redid swathes of the Keisuke Day 2 mall texting scenes to highlight the new messaging system changes.
New Keisuke Day 2 mall post-bra trying scenes, such as Zach attempting to confide his real identity with the store attendant, or Zach sending a bra selfie to Keisuke.
Expanded Zach's reaction with discomfort towards being talked about as a sex object in the Keisuke Chemistry Lab scene.
The texting system got a boost and now stores messages based on who the sender was.
I was referencing my family group chat when I made the current texting system, so I didn't realize this, but one-on-one text chats on modern phones only list the sender at the top of the screen, no in each message. The in-game chatting system has been changed to take out the names, but the eavesdropping Ai gets her own pink text bubble so you can tell when she chimes in on text conversations. She already talks in that same pink color in her own unique font (https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/playtime-with-hot-toddies), so this is a consistent choice with the rest of the game presentation.
The in-game image texting system broke sometime during the 0.6.0 GUI update and has now been repaired so that Zach can send Keisuke a bra selfie.
The sprites had some issue that I missed when I did the 0.7.0 checks. They should be largely perfect now with no pixel seams in rescaled window, no hands clipping over Zach's hips when they should be behind them, and no shadows cast over Zach's pants in the clutched arm poses when he isn't wearing a shirt.
The T-shirt now has variations with the bra straps visible. These were a pain to do, and unfortunately the straps are almost entirely obscured by the long hair options, but trust me, they look great.
Fixed issues where Zoey's hair wouldn't adjust properly from the jump menu.
The git readme was somehow included in the compiled release. That's now been removed from the builds.
Standardized "crossdressing" to "cross-dressing".
A few miscellaneous grammar and spelling fixes.
0.7.0 (03/01/2021):
ZOEY!!!
Her sprites are finally, finally here!!!
Outside of slight edits for expressions, there's no new story content because getting these things game-ready took so long, but while the words of the existing content has hardly changed, Zoey's new sprites have put everything in an entirely new context. As one of Ai's heroes, G.W. from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty said "What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context." Yes, this quote is only tangentially relevant (and I already tried to make the "sometimes video games lie to you" joke with my Sayaka writing in Student Transfer 3.0), but MGS2 is a good game and I like bringing it up, even if it's contrived.
Speaking of contrived... despite spending well over 50 hours on this update over 2 weeks, much of that time was spent organizing and partly remaking TiltSHIFT's commissioned sprites in the Clip Studio Paint file he sent me to make them consistent and more than just immutable static images (I'm particularly proud of the sweat-soaked T-shirt effect I added that you can see in Keisuke's Day 1 content). This isn't even particularly TiltSHIFT's fault. He's worked on a visual novel before, but what Espeon and I were asking from him was rather complex. The parts of Zoey's sprites are almost entirely modular, meaning that I can make pretty much any outfit combination I need. TiltSHIFT did 90% of the work getting there, but I just had to make some edits.
Speaking of (nobody own me for doing this segue two paragraphs in a row) edits... I just didn't have the time to go hard on rewrites as I had planned. Even with this update being 2 days late, the best I could do was thorough checks on outfits to make sure they didn't break, matched the story if we had the parts, or a suitable approximation was made if we didn't. More outfits are on the way, but TiltSHIFT needs time to actually make them and for me to get him up to speed on the folder organization I use so I don't spend dozens of hours correcting things.
Expressions were largely bulk replaced with a regex pattern, so some of them might be slightly off from what is being said (though I did have a chance to fine-tune some of the ones in Keisuke's Day 1 dorm scene and fully check for errors with displaying things that don't exist). The problem arises from the 3/4 poses and their missing expressions. While those 3/4 poses are on the way, again, TiltSHIFT needs time to draw them. In the meantime, suitable approximations have been made as substitutes until then.
I am pretty confident about the checking I did for graphical issues with sprites compatibility, but I might have missed something. If I did, let me know somewhere.
0.6.1 (02/13/2021):
With the help of some members in re:\Dreamer's Discord (particularly THEREJECTDRAGON and Doofus), I re-redid Zoey's measurements, and she's now:
Height: 160cm/5'3" (unchanged)
Weight: 50kg/110lbs (changed from 54kg/120lbs)
3 Sizes: 101cm/40"-58cm/23"-98cm/39" (changed from 111cm/44"-66cm/26"-98cm/39")
Breasts: 101cm/40" bust and 79cm/31", making her 32H US, 32FF UK, 70K EU, and 80E JP/KR (changed from 111cm/44" bust and 81cm/32", making her 32K US, 32H UK, 70O EU, and 80I JP/KR)
These numbers were based on the assumed measurements of model Ashley Tervort (37"-24"-35") and the listed measurements of iDOLM@STER SHINY COLORS's Sakuya Shirase (height 175cm, weight 110lb, three sizes 91cm-58cm-87cm). Azur Lane's Taihou would have been a preferred approximation but she doesn't have official sizes to reference.
No woman with the Zoey's sizes is going to be able to find underwear that will fit her at a department store, so the Keisuke Day 2 mall scene has new content and edits to reflect that they are going to a specialty women's underwear store and not a department store's underwear section.
Some of the mall backgrounds have been changed because I found better images on DLsite packs.
Edits to the Keisuke Day 4 phone call between Zach and his mom to reflect the fact that Zach used her ATM card without permission to withdraw cash at the mall to buy his expensive specialty store female underwear.
Slight edits to the Day 2 Morning scene where Ai and Keisuke meet each other for the first time.
Very slight edits in so many places that I can't even list all of them.
Ambience tracks are now on their own separate audio track so that users have even more options for audio mixing. Would you believe it if I told you that I wrote the code for this and it just instantly worked? Seriously, there's nothing scarier for a programmer than zero issues with your first attempt.
A few C.H.E.A.T.S. variables have been renamed internally ("Aloofness" into "Aloof", "Self_Esteem" into "SelfEsteem") but no player even sees that so...
In a similar vein, a lot of the Student Transfer code that I commented out has now just been deleted because I'm pretty sure I'm never going to use it.
"Transexuality (Femininity)" has been renamed to "Trans" to better reflect that it affects both transsexual and transgender attributes.
Autoplay Speed has been return to its pre-0.6.0 value of 8.0. I had accidentally double-defined it which caused it to default to 15.
C.H.E.A.T.S. values are now persistent. re:\Dreamer remembers them from saves, loads, reloads, and rollbacks. Say goodbye to remaking the values; if you find one you like, the game remembers it until you change it.
C.H.E.A.T.S. now has its own screen right on the title, full of what is probably way too much info about how the system works.
Zach no longer sets C.H.E.A.T.S. variables (should you decide to do so) from in-game menus. Instead, the C.H.E.A.T.S. screen is called once to allow readers to adjust those values.
The route select screen has been slightly overhauled. There's the sale pitch for the Patreon below the route jumps, but the big thing is that you can now open the route flowchart image from in-game. Well, kinda. The game reads your OS and asks your default image to open the image instead, but it's close enough.
The fancy image buttons on the quick menu bar have been temporally reverted to plaintext buttons to reduce lag on the GUI. I'm sad to see them go but the way they were displayed caused too much lag to justify.
The alpha-adjustment method for the adjustable GUI elements has been optimized a lot, only redrawing should the alpha opacity setting be changed.
The fancy namebox effect where the speaker's name changes the outline of the box and subtly fills the background in has been optimized a lot (those values have to be manually specified beforehand but the performance increase is huge). Shoutouts to Espeon for the good ideas here.
The in-game choice menu has a fancy new blue to pink geometric gradient background (it's almost exactly the same as the textbox background but don't tell anyone I reused an asset).
As stated above, lag on the in-game GUI has been heavily reduced.

0.6.0 (01/19/2021):
Britney has a few minutes of new content with the "Just ask her to come to your room." route where she outlines her terms for helping Zach hide his new body.
To prep for a sex scene between Britney and Zoey while the latter is being measured for clothes by the former, I redid Zoey's breast sizing on a hunch that they were wrong, and boy were they! She was listed as an 80F JP/32DD US with a 104 cm/41 in bust, but based on the sprites we have from TS, she's really an 80I JP/32K US with a 111 cm/44 in bust. That's big enough to make a thin girl's back explode without a bra. And speaking of which, Zoey now needs to go to a specialty store for her bra when she's that big, which will change the mall scene with Keisuke slightly.
Added Zoey's moaning and gasping SFX to some scenes that were missing them. If you don't like them, the fancier Voice Volume slider in the settings menu can be used to turn them off (as well as all other voice SFX and ambience, which are no longer tied to the Sound channel).
The CHEATS bars have been converted to sliders, and each stat shows you it numerical value (they're technically zero-indexed in-game but the five point scale of a traditional psychology survey question makes more sense in relation to user experience).
The GUI has been overhauled like crazy. In particular, the in-game GUI has been refurbished with a new font, a bigger stylized textbox that features on-the-fly opacity adjustment, a bigger namebox that changes based on the speaker, and text buttons for quick menu options (don't worry Android users, they scale to a larger thumb-friendly size on your phone screen).
The settings screen's sliders have been reworked to show you the current value (as well as the default, because there's nothing worse than changing a setting without realizing what it used to be).
A ton of the code for displaying things on screen has been optimized to be faster, with the exceptions of the in-game choice menus and exit screens, which have a bit of lag, likely due to bad predictive functions by Ren'Py. I'll get to optimizing them soon.
Apparently the History screen was broken for months and nobody noticed? Anyways it works now.
Android was apparently a complete mess for the longest time with bad text sizing variants and menus bleeding into each other. To make sure nothing breaks in the future, things have been standardized across all versions wherever it can still be read or clicked on a smaller phone screen.
Some SFX wouldn't loop properly while a fadein or fadeout effect was being applied, so everything has been forced to Tight looping.

0.5.5 (01/03/2021):
Heavy cuts to Britney writing after the "Just ask her to come to your room." menu choice, but the cuts have largely been replaced with new content that is better and more concise (seriously, what is up with a lot of my earlier writing tapdancing around the point it is trying to get to?).
The closet scene has been cut for now as it needs to either be replaced with something new or reworked so that Zach doesn't do something as stupid as light a road flare inside of 13 sq ft enclosure.
Edits to Britney writing after the "Try to tell her the details over text." menu choice, as well as new content.
Slight edits to the Keisuke shower sex scene.
The usual slew of minor edits for stylistic consistency.
T.E.A.C.H. has been replaced with C.H.E.A.T.S. Previously, 'self_worth' had been a separate variable originally meant for use exclusively in Keisuke's route, but it's been used like the T.E.A.C.H. stats for a while now, and this is a logical change that's been a long time coming.
Some of the C.H.E.A.T.S. variables have been renamed ("Horny" is now "Horniness", "Emotion" is now "Emotionality", "Autism" is now "Aloofness", "Trans" is now "Transexuality (Femininity)", and "Self-Worth" is now "Self-Esteem"). This doesn't change how the variables function but helps to better explain what they mean.
The personality quiz at the very start of the game has been slightly revamped to better explain what each variable affects.
Extremely large swathes of borrowed Student Transfer code have been cut out of the game to drastically increase performance. Student Transfer goes for a complicated body swap system that uses character abstractions which re:/Dreamer has no need for.
One of the biggest parts of this change is that re:/Dreamer no longer uses any of Student Transfer's code to display images. That code was rather unoptimized, and layeredimage displays take their place.
Every last cg and character sprite in the game (including the placeholders) has been redone and scaled with waifu2x to give them that extra bit of visual pop. It's most noticeable on the Keisuke mall cg, masturbation, dream sex, and the mirror self-voyeurism.
An Android-breaking bug with two of the shopping mall background images has been fixed (the JPEG files were encoded in an awful way that causes Android to have issues a PCs wouldn't).
An extremely minor issue with the bitmap font used during variations of the Keisuke mirror sex scene has been fixed so that Ren'Py's error checker no longer yells at me for something that actually works.
Outfits are no longer declared by hand with every scene change and are now a stored variable, which fixes two loose bugs. Why wasn't I doing this in the first place?

Britney's old sprites are GONE; taking their place are Myumi's new Britney.
New Britney writing after the "Try to tell her the details over text." menu choice.
A big slew of Britney edits all around.
Redid the way layeredimage sprites store character outfits since it was a bad idea to let it reset every scene. My playtesting and lint checking shows that I got everything, but if I didn't, please let me know!
Made a fancy new lex parser for standardized cps speeds independent of text tags.
Standardized text sizes (somewhat).
Redid the waifu2x 'layeredimage' scaling using 'waifu2x-caffee with upresnet10' as it gives more accurate colors than 'waifu2x-ncnn-vulcan with upconv_7' (likely due to no longer embedding an ICC profile into the new .PNG).
Removed every last "show ryouichi" call to increase performance.
Caught that I had accidentally scaled the shower hcg to 2K instead of 1080p (yay me for actually playtesting).
Some very unfinished Ren'Py screens (gallery, sprite viewer, music room) have been commented out.

0.5.3 (12/05/2020):
Edits to the Ryouichi confrontation to show off Zach as more of a scared opportunist getting revenge than a master manipulator. Zach's a lot shrewder than one might expect an autist of his caliber to be, but he's not able to pull off a mind game on that level.
Ryouichi's sprite has been removed to prevent a potential legal issue from arising because unbeknownst to me until 2 weeks ago, the visual novel source of Ryouichi's placeholder sprites received a commercial English release literally days after Ryouichi's sprites were ripped for use in this game.
Added a segment to Keisuke Day 2's morning meeting between Zach, Keisuke, and Ai based on whether or not Zach had "therapy" with Ai on Day 1, and if so, what he answered. The scene has other edits elsewhere.
There's now a proper branch between Keisuke Day 3 Party and Keisuke Day 4 morning. The gap in story is still there, but at least you don't have to access the jump menu to get to Day 4, and there's a brief summary of the unwritten events that happened later that night.
The content jump menu has been reworked for clarity and more options.
Ai has been rebuilt from scratch with proper layered source files direct from her artist. The sprites had previously been delivered as .PNGs which required some rather imperfect Photoshop skills from myself to create the individual facial expression components, the flaws of which became overwhelmingly apparent after the game window size increase. These new parts are derived from the raw independent layers and look much cleaner.
The Ai, Keisuke, shower sex HCG, and Zoey 'layeredimage' files have been rebuilt with downscaling via the waifu2x-ncnn-vulcan engine on the upconv_7 model. I had previously assumed that Lanzcos resampling algorithm would be sufficient for downscaling our very large source files to the size required by the game's 1920x1080 window, but applying that method to Ai's rebuilt 'layeredimage' files revealed noticeable anti-aliasing issues between her smaller facial components (such as her eyebrows) and the transparent pixels of the alpha channel that was not present with downscaled fully assembled sprites. Essentially, the pixels on these transparent edges were much sharper than they should have been when the image layers were assembled as a displayable within Ren'Py, waifu2x with a -1 denoise level produces more accurate scaling. But don't tell Ai that, or she'll try to take credit for an AI scaling engine producing better results.
Zoey's placeholder sprites have been rescaled to the projected size of TiltSHIFT's Zoey sprites. Yes, she's really that short (160cm/5'3") compared to Keisuke (182cm/6'0"). But highlighting the height difference between her and Keisuke isn't the reason for this adjustment; no, she has been resized in order to pair better with the size of Myumi's Britney sprites. After some prodding, he has projected a date between December 4th and December 6th to complete the first pose of Britney's sprites to the point that they can be used in-game (that means giving her a full set of expressions, her facial emotes, the casual and nude outfits, both her hairstyles, and her glasses). I know all you yuri fans out there have been lamenting Britney's neglect for over 10 months, but she's finally going to get new story content next update!

0.5.2 (11/20/2020):
The continuation of Zoey's first day of classes on the 5th day (Monday) of Keisuke's route.
A few surprises. :^)

0.5.1 (11/07/2020):
New Keiuske Day 4 content with Zoey going to her first day of classes.
Zoey's sprites have been redone from being in Student Transfer's custom method to Ren'Py's propietary 'layeredimage' method.
Bug fixes, particularly for the Android version.

0.5.0 (10/23/2020):
The game switches over from a 1280x720 resolution to a new 1920x1080 one, meaning everything just looks better.
Despite the larger files, the overall size of the game has decreased by around 30% due to managing our assets in a better manner.

0.4.4 (10/12/2020):
re: Dreamer's first birthday!
A much better route select menu built into the main screen with fancy T.E.A.C.H. sliders.
The highly-requested Android version has arrived! Each release from now on will feature an Android build.
From now on, the route flowchart will be bundled with each release as a .png, and the route flowchart has been reworked for ease of use.
Keisuke Day 3 morning is finished.

0.4.3 (09/25/2020)]:
The start of Keisuke Day 4 morning, where Zach goes to his first classes as a girl.
The conclusion of the baths sex scene.
Heavy edits to the second half of the Keisuke Day 2 shopping mall.
A simplification of T.E.A.C.H.

0.4.2 (09/11/2020):
Continues the morning-after scene with Zoey and Keisuke, and introduces a new scene were Keisuke and Ai meet for the first time.

0.4.1 (08/28/2020):
A morning-after scene with Zach and Keisuke.
Fixes for Britney's animations.
Polish to the shower sex scenes.

0.4.0 (08/15/2020):
Ai finally has sprites, and Keisuke has new sprites!
The continuation of the shower sex scene with Keisuke (with new HCG).

0.3.9 (08/01/2020):
The first half of the frat house party that Keisuke and Zach visit.

0.3.8 (07/03/2020):
Quests are no longer required daily events. Instead, certain mandatory quests with a limited window will appear from time to time, requiring Zach's prompt action to complete.
Losing the game no longer results in a player's memory loss about re: Dreamer. Now, only the discovery of an unauthorized player results in memory wiping.
Zach's "AGP Admission" is no longer a mandatory event in the "Ai Therapy" scene. Now, players can choose Zach's response to Ai, all of which are affected by T.E.A.C.H. and previous choices.
Spectators are now nigh-omnipresent in Status and will be tracking Zach's activities much more closely than before.
Sections have been "trimmed of their fat," with many long-winded conversations either locked behind high Autism or removed altogether (with the goal being to start the game proper in less time).

0.3.7 (06/24/2020):
Two new HCGs and their sex scenes.

0.3.6 (06/05/2020):
New content with a sizable shopping mall outing scene in Keisuke.

0.3.5 (05/22/2020):
Giving the game a proper intro (like a real VN).
Edits to the introduction transformation scene and solo masturbation scene to make them hotter.
Preliminary ways to edit T.E.A.C.H. variables.
Linking the stub endings to the main routes.
Lots of new backgrounds we have the rights to!

0.3.4 (05/08/2020):
The continuation of the large bathroom scene with Keisuke (with our first custom-drawn HCG)!
Filling in all the nasty WIP gaps in the story.

0.3.3 (04/24/2020):
The continuation of the large bathroom scene with Keisuke.

0.3.2 (04/09/2020):
The continuation of the large bathroom scene with Keisuke.

0.3.1 (03/26/2020):
The start of an erotic baths scene with Keisuke and Zach that flexes the power of the new T.E.A.C.H. system.

0.3.0 (03/11/2020):
The new Appendix System which gives juicy lore tidbits and info in a supplementary manner to the main game.
The start of the T.E.A.C.H. system (named such as it tracks the Zach/Zoey variables Trans, Emotion, Autism, Control, and Horny that are decided as you make choices in the game, and these essentially "teach" the main character to act or react to things in certain ways).
A save-checking system that warns you if your older saves might be incompatible due to changes in the game system.
Phone image messaging functionality (so Zoey and Keisuke can send each other sexy pictures).

0.2.2 (02/23/2020):
The biggest update yet! 2 to 4 hours of content has been added!
Zach finally goes outside of his dorm room to seek help from Keisuke, his naturally athletic and hot-blooded best friend.

0.2.1 (01/17/2020):
A dramatic and steamy continuation of the Zach/Zoey and Britney closet scene.

0.2.0 (01/05/2020):
Honestly it's a lot. The in-game version postpartum gives the details better than a proper changelog can.
Added a toggle option to avoid automatic text advancement in dramatic scenes.

v0.1.9
Britney, in which Zach/Zoey tags in a female friend to help with re. Dreamer's insanity. Steamy Dream, where Zach/Zoey confronts their dream self and learns a lot about attraction.
'audio' channel playback has been cut out when possible in favor of 'sound1' and 'sound2' SFX channels.
Ai no longer has the role of "re: Dreamer tattletale," as the ominous "Server AI" has that job now.
One (and only one) friend can be enlisted as an "accomplice" to help with re: Dreamer.
Clarified a line or two of confusion between Haze and Zach/Zoey.