Devlog #26: Illness and recovery (Patreon)

As usual, first devlog of the development cycle is public.So, if you are on the Discord server you might know that things did not start off well for this chapter. After a delay caused by me taking a few days after my post-update vacation to release Neon Heart (more on that later) I caught the plague and was out of action for basically over a week. Didn't help that I tried to rush coming back to work and probably only made things worst.The fact is that now everything is on a week-and-a-half delay and I haven't recovered completely, or at least enough to try and catch up.The silver lining is that, in my fever-induced allucinations, I got some good ideas for this chapter. As I mentioned before, this is going to be a lewd-heavy chapter. 2 threesomes, every girl gets a scene a cute "date" with the chosen Fujikawa sister and the planting of the seeds for the great finale(s). If this was a "normal" game, this would be the point of no return: everything, except the final choice, is locked in, your fate is sealed, just sit back and watch the fireworks. But, as I said, I'm behind schedule. This is not helped by the facts that I still can't stare at a screen for more than an hour at a time without getting a splitting headache AND I've gotten to a point where I'm actually feeling pride in my renders, so can spend 15 minutes posing fingers that are barely in the shot.I'm still aiming to release in November, though the aim went from "early november" to "mid November if I hurry and put everything else on hold".But what is "everything else"? Well, before my poor health rudely interrupted me, I was getting ahead with pre-production of the sequel. Mainly character design and nailing the most important story beats, as well as Neon Heart.This'll be the last post in which I mention it (if you wanna play it it's free on itch.io), but that side project actually taught me a lot of things that will be useful for the AR sequel and helped me focus my goals for it. For example:- I now know that I can easily work with 1080p renders and only lose a small fraction of time compared to now, which is negligible 'cause right now the "gating" no longer comes from rendering time, but posing time.- I now know that I can make completely custom menus.- I got way better at lighting scenes and learned how to use shaders, smoothing and other DAZ stuff that no one ever talks about.I'll hopefully be able to give you better news next week. I plan on kick the grind into overdrive to catch up starting from Monday (IRL family business will keep me away from the PC during the weekend), so stay tunedFor Roommates and House Cats, tomorrow I'll be posting October's set of 4k wallpapers, featuring a cyberpunk Stella, Sarah with kittens, a couple of spooky/halloweeny renders and the best phone wallpaper so far. See you next week!