Still Alive!

Greetings! I haven't posted for some time, but I wanted to let you know that both I and the project are still alive, and to share some of what I've been working on. This post will talk a little about why I haven't posted in so long, then get into more detail on 10.5 work and some art projects I've been working on. Let's get into it!

The Long Delay

I don't want this post to be a downer, so I'll keep this section brief, but I feel I should offer some explanation as to why I haven't posted in a while. I don't have a particularly good one, like a personal tragedy or fleeing roving bands of zombies or something. I have had some personal issues, and got distracted with those, and issues with my job and other personal projects, which led to me getting behind on this one. And this, not for the first time, led to me not posting as I didn't feel I had anything significant enough to report, especially given the long silence. I still don't, really, but it's been long enough that I feel I should at least let you know I'm alive and still working on the game. And both are, thankfully, true. Some of you have inquired about both; I very much appreciate that, and I apologize for worrying you.

Work on the Game

Now, on to the game. First, let me recap plans for the next few releases:

• 10.5: A release consisting mostly of 2 side quests - the completion of the Emily-Kittens quest, and another one giving more information about a character you already know, who will become more important soon. The last of the "downtime" releases before plot action starts picking up again.

• 10.6: An H-scene release, probably featuring one with Val and the dress shop.

• 10.7: The first of several releases focusing on recruiting Bloodfist - the last guild you need to fight the dragon - and running a dungeon with them. (After a couple of quest/dungeon releases, there will probably be another H-scene release.)

I'm still working on on the first quest for 10.5 - the Emily-Kittens quest - but the good news is that I'm now almost done. There's a boss fight yet to make, and a bunch of miscellaneous random stuff, but the writing and most of the art is done. After that's complete, I still need to make the second quest in its entirety, but I know pretty much what I want to do with it. It would probably be unwise to make time estimates, but I don't expect the second quest to take nearly as long as the first one did.

I've also been doing planning work on "World 2." I'm not going to say much about it since I don't want to spoil anything, but on thinking more about plans for upcoming releases, I've realized I need to rework a lot of the original ideas I had for World 2. World 2 will still be much shorter than the Zameroth leg of the story, but it began to dawn on me that the original plan might have weakened the emotional engagement players have with some characters, which could make the game less interesting and impactful as a whole. So I've been working on ways to mitigate that now that World 2 is a lot closer than it used to be.

Art Stuff

I've also been working on a fair bit of art stuff. This originally came up in the context of the Emily-Kittens quest - getting costumes for your routine is a big part of the quest, and thus you end up with a new costume. And because of the character/menu view features, that means I needed to make images for Alex, Ana and Emily in the new costumes.

Getting outfits for characters has become an increasingly troublesome issue. The models I use for most characters are fairly old at this point, and while there haven't really been a ton of advancements in Daz models that are relevant to my work, people aren't making new clothing specifically for them anymore. There are some built-in things that try to auto-convert outfits for newer models, but it often doesn't work that well (and has caused a few visual artifacts in H-scenes and the like that still annoy me.) This whole issue is one reason I've been learning Marvelous Designer - a 3D clothes-making program - so that I don't have to worry about it so much anymore.

As a test, I tried converting Alex to a newer model generation so Alex could use newer clothes natively. It went well except for problems with Alex's hair, and in the course of trying to figure that out, I discovered a much better way to convert clothing. While sort of a pain, it eliminated the need to convert Alex's model, so I abandoned that little project. The upshot is that I can now do a much better job converting clothing, and I used this to put together the "Kittens dance battle" costumes for our heroes. Here's Emily in her outfit:

The group they're cosplaying as is called Sparkle Witches, btw. And here's the whole trio, their hard work during the quest hopefully having paid off:

Looking at all this nuts and bolts stuff, though, got me thinking again about something that's always bothered me. And that thing is Alex's model - specifically Alex's face. You may notice that I often show Alex's face in a 3/4 view, like in character portraits; that's not a coincidence, it's because Alex's model looks much better that way. I've always thought Alex looked particularly bad in dead-on shots, such as this one:

I've always been deeply uncomfortable with that picture. And so, inspired by my success with clothing, I set about trying to revise Alex's model to make it look better but still recognizably Alex. It ended up being rather involved, but after a lot of back and forth here's what I came up with:

Now, that picture still doesn't look great - the expression's a little odd - but I do think it looks better. Here are some portrait-type images to compare:

And here's a final omake image comparing the two - first is "original" Alex, and next is the revised one:

I personally like the revised one more, but I'm not 100% happy with it. (I like the lips a bit better on the original, and am working to get that refined a bit.) What do you think? Which do you like more? Don't worry if you don't agree with me; I'm legitimately interested in the feedback.

Anyway, if Alex is well-received - or I decide to further change Alex's model after critique - I'm thinking of applying the same process to some of the other characters. I think Emily is in rather dire need of a similar treatment. Probably won't give Ana that treatment, though, since I basically have to show her face in 3/4 because of her hairstyle.

Beyond that, I anticipate getting much deeper into Blender to finally transition the game's art out of Daz. I'm sort of torn, though... Blender seems like it's changing so quickly that it's hard to keep up with it all. At first it seemed like it was trying to be Maya... but now with the huge focus on geometry nodes, it seems like it's trying to be Houdini? I get that Houdini is really hot in the 3D world right now, but all the node stuff feels more like programming than art. And I can sorta do both, but... I don't like to do both at the same time?

All I really want is a good hair system, but as of Blender 4.5 the recent hair I made for Emily (the "Emily Pink" image) no longer works. I could probably muck around in the geometry nodes and figure out how to get it going again, but the next major release of Blender will probably change the hair system again - to something much better that supports physics, which is good. But still... redoing stuff so much makes me feel like I'm wasting time. And I would just bite the bullet and do everything in Maya, but if I ever wanted to do animation, Arnold GPU probably isn't sufficient for my compositing needs, and I'd have to rent a render farm to do an animation with Arnold CPU... while Blender's Cycles is something I can use in GPU mode with my existing hardware.

Speaking of hardware, one distraction I dealt with was moving laptops again - but I think I'll be with this one for a while, especially given how underwhelming recent CPU/GPU releases have been. It's quite a step up from the one I was previously using, which definitely helped with the art projects lately.

Conclusion

So, that's where I'm at. I'm sorry for not posting for so long, and I'm both sorry and personally bummed for not having more done on 10.5. But I have been getting things done, just not as much as I (and probably you) would like. But I have been having fun writing again, and having fun with the art, so I take that as a good sign. Please let me know what you think of the revised Alex model, even - or especially - if you hate it. Thank you for your concern, thank you for your patience, and thank you for your support!