Mid Of The Month Updates And Talking About Illusion's Demise (Patreon)

I was working on Oryo from Like A Dragon: Ishin as second project when GDC told me about releasing Cammy's classic outfit so I moved the project up to match that. Oryo should be finished in few days and after that it's commissioned project turn and maybe Chun-Li's classic hair if we have enough time. So that's the plan for this month.

Now for the sad news of this month, you may have heard it already but Illusion, the company behind Honey Select/Honey Select 2 is closing their shop. This means no hope for Honey Select 3, or any new games from them. I've known the company for a long time, played many of their games and following news about them. I have to admit though most of their games didn't hold my attention for long. Only recently when the community and modding support became much better and a sandbox mode that is Chara Studio/Studio NEO included in their games they became more than passing interest to me.

What does this means to me, as a modder, or community as a whole? Well, Illusion already stopped official support for Honey Select 2 (and of course much older Honey Select 1), so it doesn't matter much for the community who work hard to keep the game(s) alive. And I can see them keep doing it in foreseeable future, hell I can say I haven't got bored with Honey Select 2 for now. In time, community contents and mods will slow down, but that's normal. I've said before that in the future I want to slowly branch out doing stuff outside of HS2 and even outside of Illusion. The plan doesn't change, it's just "future games from Illusion" is now out of question.

So what about other recent remaining Illusion games? I have no interest with Room Girl at all, as Studio guy I don't care much about the new main game. Don't like the new graphics style too, and the lack of necessary plugins. Then recently I tried Koikatsu Sunshine. So recent that I only tried chara creator and the studio so far (again I really don't like Illusion's "main" gameplay). I can say I like it, but not enough to mod it. All the content I want seems to be already available, and I'm not too fussy about character accuracy in anime-styled games so I don't need head mods. Plus I don't follow modern anime to begin with so very few anime characters I care about.

tl;dr: Illusion is dead, no hope for new Honey Select, I will keep doing HS2 stuff until I lose the passion and audience dies down. Not gonna move to Room Girl or Koikatsu, maybe I'll try non-Illusion games or even make things in Blender as long term plan.