Sideways progress.

If the last several days were to have a music video created about them, that video would almost certainly feature MC Skat Kat. If you instantly understood that reference, congratulations... you're old.

Anyway, it's been several days of learning a new engine and more importantly, learning the ins and outs of new skin shaders. The new shaders look better, but that comes with the price of learning how the shaders interact with different lighting, and how to deal with the changes they make to certain things, those things mainly being nipples and dicks.

Everything I figured out how to deal with one problem, another appeared, but I think I have things nailed down enough to start production in earnest, though the opening scene is overly complicated to make (thanks, me), and as such will take quite a bit more work than normal. Luckily it isn't the longest scene in the world, but since it's the first I wanted it to have a bit of a hook and set the tone for the rest of the game.

I'm not trying to say I wrote a masterpiece here... far from it... but I wrote the scene in such a way that I'll need to do quite a bit of photoshop work to make certain elements, and before that I have to capture those elements, the hardest part of which is doing the mental gymnastics of two parallel locations interacting with each other and... it's hard to explain and, in the end, not nearly as impressive as it might sound.

Anyway, there was a lot of time spent in the character creator applying the new textures and making tweaks here and there, and some characters got tweaked a bit more than others, so I figured I'd go ahead and show the most drastic changes that were made. Before that, however, I want to show you the new shaders in action.

The model on the left has the old shaders, new ones on the right. Both are in the same scene with the same lighting (though I didn't spend a lot of time lighting the scene, I just kinda threw some lighting up and went with it (I also have a different shader on the hair of the right model, which I might abandon).

One of the main issues of the new shaders is not being able to get the same colors, or in the case of tattoos, the same darkness. It's not a huge thing, but... it's a thing.

Now for what made me not just abandon the new shaders when all the problems first arose... the new "wet" look. Same models, same pose, same lighting... just wet:

Instead of just a blanket "wetness," I can adjust it so there's just streaks and drops, as well as adjust the amount and size of those elements. I also have a new slider for the wetness of a certain bit of female anatomy, and you know that's going to get used.

Okay, so that's a basic overview of the new shaders, now let's look at, well... new looks.

These still may be tweaked a bit before they're final, but I wanted to update some looks, especially for those with hairstyles I wasn't in love with.

I think that's it for now... expect the sexy-time scenes to be a lot more sweaty in the spin-off and I'll be back in a few days with the next update! Oh... you can see a lot more of the learning process in detail in the "nsfw-pre-production" area of the Discord server (including spicier pictures and even a test animation or two), so check that out if you're interested!