Gambino had to leave the project to take care of some IRL issues.
It comes at a bad time since we were right in the middle of refactoring the animation code.
The current H-animation system is functional but very janky/wonky/awkward and severely impacts the game's presentability.

But we've brought on 2 new people who both show promise.
It will take at least a week to familiarize MigatteNo, the new coder, with the project architecture.
The project files are quite sprawling by now so I don't expect anyone to jump right in.
We're also joined by InnocentWorld who is writing the first sample VN adventure.

His original draft was based on a short story involving a mysterious tower dungeon and various transformation themes.
He's currently reworking it after I showed him the functionality Renfield's VN kit will offer.
On that topic, here's what's working so far in the prototype VN mode:

-define statements
With these you designate a PNG card file made in the Character Editor.
The game loads, skins, morphs and clothes your character and saves an instance of it.
Or you can just use sprite art.

-default statements
Various variables used to track decisions and progress.
You'll be able to branch code based on these and your characters' stats.

-labels, jumps and menus
Branching by choice or by test allows CYOA functionality.
These can be set up with a standard old-school cardinal direction navigation scheme.
So dungeon crawls are possible in addition to linear/branching stories.

-play, scene and with statements
For now you only have sprite art to work with but eventually you'll be able to use 3D locations.
The spawnable 3D locations will consist initially of a selection of scenes.
I do have a system for building directly in the world a la Fallout 4 but it's far from ready.
Only simple fade and dissolves for scene transitions for now.

-show statements
As stated above, you can use 2D or 3D characters.
Sprite-based characters will change their emotions or stances via alternative sprites in the usual Ren'Py way.
However the 3D RF character models will morph according to specific morph names or by defined presets.
[show marco smile] Will make the defined character Marco raise the first morph containing "smile" to 1.0.
But with a defined character card called "giggle" with 0.5 smileFullFace,
0.3 flirtingMasculine and 0.2 raiseEyebrowLeft we can have much more control.
Now [show marco giggle 0.5] sets it to half the weights of each of those sub-morphs.
[show marco giggle +-0.1] creates an idle animation where he ping-pongs between 0.4 and 0.6 of the "giggle" composite.
A similar system will be used for various poses by blending 2 of them and varying the weight of the blend over time.

-markup commands
Covers bold, italic, variables embedded in speech, etc.
In order to expand the features of this system in a useful way I'm organizing
the commands and keywords in the order they appear in Ren'Py's documentation.

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What I'm trying to achieve, with the help of the community, is something akin to the Eamon RPG system from the DOS days.
Eamon was all about making your own adventures and playing those made by others, usually with the same character.
The adventures varied tremendously in quality and content, but even the bad adventures were fun.
With RF you can choose to make a very self-contained story with all premade characters or allow players to field their veterans,
retaining all the progress and physical/emotional/stat changes that might apply.

Further, the 3D realtime action/adventure segments and the VN segments will be interchangeable.
You could have your primary game play out with an open world and use the VN to handle conversations, lore dumps and time skips.
Or you could have most of the story told in VN with instanced 3D action scenes.

As always let me know if you have any questions or would like to volunteer.

10/12 - Added nearly 400 pose bases
10/14 - Gathering / organizing materials for the new team members
10/16 - Working on a CSV-based alternate system for the VN scripts.
10/18 - Comparing Ren'Py functionality to various popular engines/systems seen on TFGames. Looking to scale from a pure VN style control and gameflow model to an optional RAGS model of adventure interpreter.
10/20 - Outlining long-term branching paths for sample story.
10/22 - Nearly finished with the sample story outline
10/24 - Resolving an issue with Unity package cache