Weekly Update/Preview Nov 27-Dec 4

Alrighty, let's get right into it. It does feel like I have a good amount of stuff to talk about, although I'm starting actually writing this out a little later than I probably should have. 

So first off, I do want to get an update out this week. There are some question marks around that, but it is the current objective in any case.

There was a fairly long discussion in the game discussion channel of the discord that is probably worth highlighting though. A lot of stuff was said, but at a high level:

• I am having mental issues (though I feel like that's not all that surprising to hear about porn game devs) and it is not great for productivity.
• I am probably too hard on myself and the quality/quantity of my work in general.
• Considering the quality of the game I'm making, the amount of money that I'm making is... Incorrect.
• I still need to do more about advertising as well as figuring out the where and how to do that.
• I should probably get the whole "early access to releases" thing set up, although that is somewhat difficult to do when I don't actually have a release ready to go out to anyone.

So at present uhhh... I'm not sure exactly? Like I probably should get the next update ready, release it as early access to Knight+Paladin tier, then release it publicly like a week later or something. I just have this weird aversion to doing anything that could be in any way construed as scummy. Might just be my feelings on the whole "crowdsourcing development through recurring payments being rife for abuse" thing. It's just a difficult thing to make a call on I guess.

Let me know about any strong opinions you hold after reading this... Or not that strong opinions that you just want to share even. I do certainly like to discuss things.

But to discuss the tweets themselves...

Actual caveman noises

It kinda feels like I've been favoring Raine in twitter screenshots? I don't actually know if that is the case in terms of the numbers, but that's just the feeling I've randomly been hit with. Not really that important.

Since every main character has a base model that you can just, y'know, change the clothes of, it's not terribly difficult to make alternate costumes when needed for CGs. Still, in this specific case I'm just really happy about this Raine one in particular. The pretty clothes and the change of hair with her heavy embarrassment, with the shading doing juuuust enough to still give the impression of some broadness and musculature of her shoulders... I don't know, it's nice.

I try not to have favorites, and even if I did, I probably wouldn't say it was Raine, but she has been growing on me somewhat through writing her scenes. She was initially conceived to be rather tomboyish, and she is that, but it also feels like there's more than just that. There's enough thoughtfulness, self-awareness, and even insecurity to keep her from feeling one-note. It's the kind of thing that surprises me a little bit comparing against where I first started with her character. Something to be proud of I guess.

Also she pretty.

Personal space bubble

Witch doing Witch things. It's making me realize that she really hasn't interacted with the knights individually all that much. In basically all situations, it's been her with the full group of knights and the inquisitor. While it's not that hard to get an impression of the opinions that each knight has ended up forming of her, that isn't quite the same thing as actual dynamics between them. All that to say, this picture in particular is for a scene of just Elli and the Witch in particular. In most cases previously, Elli has been mostly just amused or snarky at the Witch while other characters handled the actual conversation with her. Now with more direct interaction... Well, I guess we'll see.

As a random aside, this picture also doesn't have any image-to-image AI use. The site I normally use was having issues and I didn't want to go through setting things up locally (my GPU is quite old so I prefer to outsource the hardware requirements), so I just went without. The end product is still perfectly acceptable and honestly not all that different from the usual, so I don't know how important this is to comment on or not.

What will I use it for

For legal caution reasons, I choose not to be specific about the program used for screenshot taking, so I won't be very specific here either, but yeah. The feeling that I should upgrade how certain things were set up/installed has been hanging around in my head for a while. I'm still getting a handle on some of the new plug-ins and options that I've suddenly found myself with, and so this CG in particular is probably not the biggest and best example of the improvement. It may not even be that obvious what doing an upgrade has even provided me here that I didn't have before.

While it isn't obvious from the end result, the panties in the picture are also a 3D model just like Raine herself is. I SUPPOSE that I could have simply drawn panties into the picture just like I drew the speech bubble, but that's not the point. Basically, being able to place individual objects in a screenshot without them being attached to a character model is a lot easier now. Some of the weird jank that remember doing when setting up screenshots for stuff like the Mindfuckers... Well, again, I can't be too specific, but the point is that things are better now. And better is good.