Perpendicular Expression of a Horizontal Desire (Patreon)

Greetings! I hope you've been staying safe out there and enjoying your time in lockdown - and if not, I hope it's at least not driving you stir-crazy. I've been headed that way myself, but at least I've managed to channel it toward getting things done on the game. Last time I floated the idea of shrinking Ana's er, package to slightly more realistic proportions, and many of you chimed in to say that you really liked it big and hoped that I wouldn't do so. None of the comments were in favor of it, actually, so I want to report that I heard you, and decided to keep it (mostly) the same! I did still go back and re-render/tweak many of the images from the first H-scene. I'm not happy with all of them, but some of them I really do like - for instance, the one included with this post! I still kinda want to go back and mess with some of the others, but at some point you just have to let it go. And I'm pretty happy with the scene involving Sami, which does make me feel okay overall about the art for this release.

The second scene - the one with Sami, Ana and Alex - really was a learning experience for me, much more so than the first one. It really brought home how important lighting of the environment is to the overall look of the scene, and how you can make even a fairly plain environment more interesting by judicious use of lighting. As I mentioned in a previous post, the first scene takes place in 3 separate environments, and I think the later images particularly suffered from not having enough attention paid to lighting the environment. The Sami scene also taught me how to use more complicated lights, and a few tricks for making more complex layer masks in Photoshop. All of which will hopefully make me a better artist going forward!

This week I did some work preparing the picture pack for 0.9, making sure all the right images are in there and that sort of thing. I realized that in previous packs I hadn't included the omake (various images I include in posts) and release promo images, so I went back and made sure I got them all in. In the process, I had to go back and look at the images I made when this project started, and I began comparing them to what I'm making now. It was sort of funny - I'm still pretty far from what I would consider good, but I think I've improved! I'm still refining my style, but I think I'm definitely starting to develop one. Hopefully toward the end of the project I'll look back on the stuff I'm making now with the same sort of embarrassment!

Since the art for this release is now done, I turned my attention to finishing up writing for the H-scenes, and I think they turned out pretty sexy - hopefully you'll enjoy them, too! I'm now working on the quest that opens up the new H-scene hub, and over the next week I plan to complete that, finish up the various conversations in the nightclub, and start working on the remainder of the plot-related quests for this release. This release has a lot of art - the two H-scenes and all the stuff related to Character View - and I'm glad to finally be done with it. 0.10 will also have a lot, since I'll be switching people in the real world over to the stylized look, but I'll worry about that once 0.9 is finished. Stay safe out there, and thank you for your support!