Devlog #37: Valentine's and Timeloss (+ Q&A announcement) (Patreon)

(This post is a special one that goes out to all members, the reason will be clear later on) Follow me, if you will, as I weave you the tale of a bad week:Everything started out fine. Last weekend I finished Alex' ending and I had decided to start working on one of the three harem endings, just get an idea of what they would look like.On Monday morning I opened a can of White Monster and got down to writing, coming up with a clever little way to get each girl a bit of "content" and got to rendering in the afternoon.Immediately I realized what a horrible mistake I had made. My PC is pretty beefy, top of the "budget" (quotes there doing a LOT of heavy lifting) line for this kind of work, but holy shit Iray is an unoptimized piece of shit! With some heavy compromise and a lot of trickery I can put in 5 to 6 characters in a scene, but it takes time to set everything up and every render needs to be redone multiple times with varying numbers of girls. "Not that big of a deal", I thought. I was kinda prepared for it and, despite those issues, I still got a very productive Monday.Tuesday rolls around and, now with an idea of what an harem ending would look like, I decide to start looking into making "The Guide", thinking that if I work on it a little bit every night I might get it done by the time the anniversary rolls around.NOPE! I don't wanna do a simple walkthrough, I wanna do something a little bit more elaborate, like those massive guides that you used to get back in the day that costed as much as the game itself! Something with character profiles, artwork, screenshots, etc...Realizing that it's actually a massive undertaking, I put it on the back-burner and decided to get back to work on the game the next day. That's when I realized that Valentine's day is approaching. Now, while I personally don't care about it since I'm single, I'm currently part of a massive bundle on Itch and I was supposed to make some renders for it.Since I was still in a relatively good place with the game's renders, I got to work on those and on a few miscellaneous ones to post on social media to promote myself. Thinking that everything was going to be fine! Thursday and Friday are going to be awesome! I'm gonna get so much shit done!To keep an already painfully long story short: spent all morning at the bank due to "document issues", spent all afternoon running errands, got home, ate dinner, went to bed feeling not okay and spent all night bent over the toilet 'cause I ate something that upset my stomach in a way I've never experienced.This morning (or, more precisely, this afternoon) when I woke up I was a wreck. I still got a bit of work done, but all my plans for work and the anniversary got completely fucked.So, here's what's going to happen: we are all going to pretend this week never happened.I'm gonna attach a clean 1080p version of the Valentine's renders to this post for you all to enjoy.We gonna pretend that I've spent all week learning and optimizing the use of the Collision Shells... oh wait, I need to explain them 'cause they are dope!I can't show examples without geting nuked, so I urge you to come to our discord to see them 'cause they are awesome! So, basically, you know when models in DAZ are grabbing a bum or a boob, but they aren't REALLY grabbing it and just hovering really close to it? The collision shells deform the model according to where the hand makes contact. It's got a learning curve, but I'm getting quite decent at using them.And now, for the anniversary! I only got a single special render that took hours to make and all my other plans went out in smoke! So, I'm gonna ask for your help! I wanna make it a Q&A!In the comments of this post ask any question you'd like me to answer and I'll do it on the post I'll be making on the 17th.Also, as a heads up, tomorrow I'll be making a cross-promotion post with another dev and friend of the page Amomynous. They are a good egg and have the best girl ever Jenny.And that's everything from me. I'm gonna go die in bed, you ask questions below please! Otherwise aunt Emily will scold you!