What's Next for Cetol — The Roadmap (Patreon)

Quick thing before the roadmap: Cetol just came back, and I know a lot of you have questions. The fastest way to get answers is the Patron Q&A on the cetol.me homepage — right sidebar. I collect the questions that come in and answer them there, and I'm updating it pretty often right now. Ask yours there, or browse my answers to others — there's a good chance your question is already covered.

Now, here's where Cetol is headed over the next couple of months — what I'm working on right now, and what's coming after.

1. New characters, twice as fast

The work production pipeline is now complete and optimized end to end, and the practical result is simple: I can build cards about twice as fast as before. New characters stay my main focus — when nothing big pulls me away, that's where most of each month goes.

2. A dedicated Girls' Frontline 2 material set — and a batch card drop

A huge chunk of this community came here from Girls' Frontline 2, so GFL2 is getting its own dedicated material set. Basically every game I cover gets one, but GFL2's shading style is more distinctive than most, so this set is taking longer to get right — and with this many GFL2 fans here, I'd rather take the extra time and make it one of the best I've made. The plan: finish the set around late August into early September, then release two or three GFL2 cards at once, all built on it.

3. W — she's finally happening

A lot of you have been asking about W, and you deserve a straight answer. I promised this card a long time ago and never shipped it. The honest reason: my early attempts weren't good enough. The results looked bad, I kept reworking them and couldn't get them where they needed to be, and I wasn't willing to ship her like that — so it dragged on far longer than I ever wanted. I'm sorry it took this long.

Here's what's changed. Building the Arknights: Endfield material set gave me the full pipeline experience — texture channels, shading, the whole stack — so I can now model directly toward Endfield's in-game look instead of guessing at it. And there are solid, mature Endfield-style model examples out there now that I can reference, which pushes the overall quality up another notch. In short: I can finally build her the way she deserves.

One thing worth being clear about: W starts from the source character, but the hair and outfit are being rebuilt from scratch — this is full custom model work, not a straight recreation. She's aiming for early September, and she'll be released as an original card.

4. Head models — the near-term approach, and a bigger fix down the road

KK's stock head is showing its age. Expressions break down past a certain point, faces pick up jagged edges and odd angles, the head shape itself fights you, and the neck seam never quite goes away. I pushed the stock head about as far as it goes on Velina and Zhuang Fangyi — and you can still see the ceiling in their expressions and fine details.

Long term, I'm going to completely rebuild KK's head and body models. That unlocks a lot — sculpted faces that finally hold up, proper expressions, and a much higher ceiling for what KK can do overall. When that lands, I'll shift back to face-sculpting and put more of my own ideas into each character.

Until then, more of my cards will use head models adapted from the source characters. Modern games have extremely mature character pipelines, and matching an official face by hand inside KK gets harder every year. Adapting the source head simply gets a better result in less time — which also means more cards for you.

5. A completely new physics system

Koikatsu Sunshine still handles physics with Dynamic Bone — tech that's pushing ten years old, and it shows. So I'm rebuilding the physics system from the ground up. It's already in testing and should ship soon. When it lands, we finally get modern physics in KKS — much more natural, stable motion. I think this is the one a lot of you have been waiting for.

6. Original Koikatsu — I hear you

Since the relaunch, the single most-asked question — by a wide margin — has been "does this support KK?" The demand here is clearly much bigger than I expected.

My honest recommendation is still Koikatsu Sunshine: better voice work, better lighting, better animations — everything I make is at its best there. But I get that switching takes time, and I'm not going to make you wait until you're ready.

So here's the updated plan: instead of waiting for the bigger rebuilds to finish, I'll do my best to get a KK-support system working within the current framework. KK's engine is a lot older, so it won't be trivial — but the demand is real, so it's moving up the list.

7. Materials keep getting better

Honest self-assessment: today's materials sit at around a 7 out of 10 for me. The goal is a 9. Every new card and every dev cycle is another iteration pass, so expect the existing materials to keep tightening up release by release — not just the new ones.

8. Small fixes that add up

Alongside the big items, I keep shipping smaller quality-of-life fixes. One example: high heels raise a character's overall height, which can throw off body alignment when characters interact. Fixes like that go straight into the plugin packages — no separate post for each one, but every package update ships with a short changelog. Just keep your plugin package current — the free pack or the Cetol Super Plugin Pack, whichever you use — and you'll have everything automatically.

9. Studio tools — tell me if you want them

This one's a question for you. Studio work has always been more painful than it needs to be, and I could build some seriously good Studio plugins to streamline it. But my sense is that most of you are mainly here for the game itself, so I honestly don't know how much demand there is. If better Studio tools would matter to you, say so in the comments — if there's enough interest, I'll make it happen.

That's the roadmap. Thoughts on any of it — especially the Studio question — go in the comments; questions about how anything works go to the Patron Q&A on the homepage. Thanks for backing me. More soon.