Last Steps To 0.6.1.8 (Patreon)

Good evening,It’s gotten a bit late again today, but before I call it a day, I’d like to summarize the past week for you.

In short, I spent a large part of the week on image editing for the animations, as expected. I worked on 3 animations with two angles for each, so 6 animations + transitions to expand the scene with Lyvia/Tia/Bianca. I also continued writing the story and made some changes to better integrate Rose into it. I don’t yet know how far I’ll take her character development in this update. I think that will become clear next week, depending on how long the rest of the work takes.

Other things I worked on include a snow covered version of Kirlic, the entrance gate isn’t fully finished yet, and additional dialogue progression with the quest + some images for that.

I’ll do everything I can to finish the update next week. There are still quite a few texts to write, and of course test runs still need to be done, but at the moment I’m optimistic that I might be able to pull it off.

One more thing on the topic of AI: Thank you for all your comments and for participating in the poll. I've read through them and I will take them to heart. As you can imagine, this isn’t an easy topic for me, and I won’t make any rushed decisions. A large portion of you (on Patreon) voted that I should first engage more deeply with the topic before using anything, while the rest of you is split between use it if it speeds things up and don't use it because it changes the style of the characters too much. I've decided to keep everything as it is for now and most importantly don't change anything for existing characters. However I will look more into the topic when I have time.I also plan to make some animations that I just wouldn't be able to do without AI (such as dynamic events that aren't related to female characters)I don’t want to change how the characters look, which from what I've read is the biggest concern and I also want to keep the style of the characters. The main focus would be on improving lighting, shadows, and body physics, and if it also speeds up development, that would of course be great, but as many of you already said, it shouldn’t come at the cost of quality. I’ll think it through carefully and then see what can be useful and what isn’t.

I just did another test for Rose, and you can check the result on Discord. In this case, I created a single pose image and background without the animation and had the AI process it. The characters themselves remained unchanged, and maybe this is an approach everyone can live with. Normally, an animation like that would take me about 3 hours. First adapting the animation to the characters and then post processing all the images. This time it took about 30 minutes, and I’m very open to your feedback on that as well.

That’s everything for this week. Hopefully next week will be the final sprint.I wish you all a nice weekend!