W.I.P. Info ~ Happy New Year!! + Plans for the next few months! (Patreon)

Happy New Year!! I hope you have a great year!! (and I also hope you keep supporting me over the year).

I wanted to post this yesterday but I've been having some problems with my PC. It started to shut down randomly and rebooting since yesterday. I don't have a clue what's causing the problem (It was perfect till a couple of days ago). I've been trying to search online for solutions. I've reviewed the cables, made a SFC /scannow, run the antivirus... etc... Right now, it seems to be back to normal, but the fear of it randomly rebooting at any given moment is still in the back of my head. I'll wait and see how it behaves for the next couple of days (I hope the problem is resolved).

Well, let's talk business! I want to announce my plans for this and the next few months, so you know what to expect:

DOM vs. HWR

I'll be working on DOM and TDK 2.0 this month. I'll TRY to finish the first chapter of DOM (with an emphasis on "TRY") because I already decided to work on the next two chapters of Kanon's Valentine Especial in February and March. There are still some 15 pages left (more or less), so I'll do my best to at the very least leave it almost finished by the end of this month.

If I don't finish I'll keep working on it in February and March on my "free time" (the few pages left), so both Kanon's Valentine Especial and the first chapter of DOM will be done by March. The last few pages should be just some kind of short epilogue to close the chapter, so I'll strive to finish the sex scene by this month! (so I won't leave you hanging on a cliffhanger this time).

The next chapters should be much shorter and episodic, so from April onward, I'll make polls for you to decide between DOM and My Girlfriend (which one should I work on each month).

My Girlfriend

My Girlfriend will be resuming this year. As I said I'll make polls from April forward for you to choose which chapter will be released each month. However I'll probably work on both in April since (if everything goes as planned) TDK 2.0 should be ready by then, which will leave me with extra time until you decide which my next Visual Novel will be.

DOM vs. My Girlfriend

As I see it, with my current skill/speed, there's no way I would be able to finish one chapter of DOM in one month. So I think I'll need at least two months to finish one chapter (unless I become much faster... which I trust I'll accomplish with a little more time/experience in making manga).

That's something that won't happen with My Girlfriend. Since my Girlfriend is in another format (CG). I'm confident I'll be able to finish one chapter of My Girlfriend in the span of one month.

So DOM will take 2 months to make (half of it released each month) and My Girlfriend just one. Just saying, so you can keep it in mind when you vote in the future.

TDK 2.0

I'm almost here:

Which means I'm roughly 2/3 done with the changing room scene. I say this every month, but once I finish this (f***ing) scene, everything else will be downhill. So I'll be striving to finish it this month because I really (REALLY!!) want to time the release of TDK 2.0 with the release of Kanon's Valentine Especial! I don't want to make any promises I won't keep, but I'll try my hardest so TDK 2.0 will be done by March (or April at the latest).

So, to summarize:

January:

• Finish the first chapter of DOM (hopefully).
• Finish the changing room scene from TDK 2.0 (hopefully).

February:

• Release of Kanon's Valentine Especial Chapter 3
• Working on the Cafe, Cinema, and Bathroom scenes of TDK 2.0

March:

• Release of Kanon's Valentine Especial Chapter 4
• Release of the few pages left of DOM Chapter 1 with cover and afterword page(s).
• Finish the Bathroom scene and the Epilogue of TDK 2.0

April:

• Making corrections and fine tunning everything for the release of TDK 2.0
• Release of TDK 2.0
• Release of the next chapter of My Girlfriend.
• Release of the first half of DOM Chapter 2

This is a rough schedule that might have changes (or not). I'll try my best to stick to it!

Making manga... (skip it if you don't care about my suffering... or technical stuff... or manga...)

Believe it or not, the experience I'm earning by learning to make manga is paying off on other stuff (like CG, Pin-Ups, or even the renders for TDK 2.0). It's helping me "see" renders in a different way. Somehow I no longer consider making CG as challenging as before.

When I do CG or VN, it's like a snapshot (like taking a photograph). What you see is what you got at the end. You often don't have to even change the camera angle, so the main work is to change the pose and expression of the characters.

With manga is much more tricky. You have to take into consideration the form of the frames, so most images got cropped. However, I also have to consider the sequential result of those frames (changing camera angle, zoom level, positioning in regard to the position of the frame on the page... etc...).

A lot of times what I render doesn't work! But I don't get to see it until I put everything together on the manga page. Sometimes it doesn't crop well, sometimes it doesn't fit the sequence, sometimes it just sucks!! (even though it looked good in the Studio). So I have to redo a lot of what I do.

The good news is that (even though it still doesn't show in practice), I'm needing fewer tries to do what I want to do when rendering the pictures for manga. I'm starting to picture the frame (how the render will look cropped) before taking the "snapshot". And that's also helping me picture renders for CG and Visual Novel in a different way.

Even though is often frustrating, I'm enjoying making manga a lot!! I'm posting some of the renders I didn't use for DOM after Erika's Pin-Up. There were a lot more, but I already erased them because they didn't work. I kept those just in case I might need them, but they were useless in the end. I might as well post them here before I erase them (they are raw pictures before post-processing).

Thanks a lot for your support over the past year! I really appreciate it! I'll try even harder this year to give you high-quality stuff!! See you in the next post!