Dev Diary #4 - new tech (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

It’s Dev Diary time! These past weeks have been quite different from the usual narrative-focused updates. Instead, I have dived deep into the technical side of things.

The shift began with some necessary revisions (Plat members on Discord seen some sneak peeks). Initially, I was tweaking how the toga outfit turned out, which I wasn't happy with. But as I listed more improvements, I decided to make this sprint focused on the latest AI technologies.

The visual novel started some time ago, and with the rapid advancements in tech, there are many new tools and models that reduce the need for extensive hand-drawing and workarounds.

AI has always been a part of my toolkit – essential for producing high-quality CGs amidst the writing and everything else. But some scenes in the last couple of updates were really hard to get right and almost done from scratch.

On the animation front, there are some promising technologies emerging, though they seem a bit premature for full-scale use. I’ll continue to experiment at a later date.

On the image generation side, I’ve dedicated many hours to playing around with these new models. My goal was to maintain the unique game art style while improving the visuals.

After spending hundreds of dollars on training to capture our lovely cast and style accurately, I'm excited about the progress, though it's still a work in progress but nearly there.

This opens a lot of possibilities, including even increasing the game resolution, but I want to manage expectations as I check the workload involved for the previous CGs.

Exclusive for Plat Members:  I’m sharing some ultra-high-resolution samples and a remastered CG shot as part of my experiments. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing what’s possible with these new tools!

Thank you all for your continued support and enthusiasm. I know there wasn't story progress but I felt this was actually rather fruitful and I'll go back to story now.