Tentative Release: Late September (Patreon)

Greetings! I'm still at work on the long quest, but the end is in sight. I think I'll be done with it by next week, and then I can start the final quest, which I figure will probably take a week, maybe a week and a half. Then there's some finishing touches, testing, and then I should finally be done. So, I'm going to go out on a limb and say 0.9 will be released in September. Late September, but September nonetheless. Just to set proper expectations, I want to say up front that it probably won't blow your mind, and I can't really say it's been worth the wait, but what's there is good and I like it. It'll probably be around 2-3 hours in length, and will have 2 H-scenes, one of which (the Sami scene) is rather long and features some of my favorite renders so far.

In other news, RPG Maker MZ came out, and just as I'd hoped it brings drastically improved performance. The editor is also much nicer to work with in general, so I'll work on converting the project as soon as I'm done with 0.9. The data is really similar between MV and MZ, and I was able to open up the project just by copy-pasting my old stuff into a new MZ project. Pretty much everything is there, but since I use a lot of plugins a few things are screwed up, and much of the game logic doesn't work. Don't worry, though. I should be able to automate fixing most of the logic and plugin-related stuff, and I've actually already done some important work on that front.

This past week I created an HTML/JavaScript thing that will serve as the base for converting what needs converting in the project. At present it only converts the nameplates and text formatting (both of which use a different format because of plugins,) and it seems to work. If for some reason you're interested, you can check it out here. Once 0.9 is out, I'll work on remapping plugin commands and a few script calls from MV to MZ. I don't anticipate any of that being very difficult; I've already overcome many of the problems in completing my initial version of the tool. I'll have to revisit a few of the plugins I wrote, but probably not too many.

I intend to keep 0.10 very limited in scope, and thus hope to release it pretty quickly. It'll be almost exclusively focused on porting the game to MZ and doing the combat mechanics revamp I talked about last time. I may also add an H-scene and the arena (to let you test out these mechanics.) If I just do the port and combat mechanics, I'll probably take me a month to complete. If I add in an H-scene and the arena, it'll probably take me two. I'm still trying to decide which makes more sense. In either case, the game will have a much better base to build on going forward. 

I've also been trying to get better with Blender, since I'd like to fully switch art over to it in the future. I'd hoped to do it for the next H-scene, but it may have to wait until the one after that. I've done all my art up to this point in Daz Studio, which is really a hobbyist program. It can make some really nice images these days, and there's a few things it can do very well, but if you want to move outside those things it's pretty much impossible. Blender, like Maya, 3DS Max and a few others, are general purpose 3D applications. If you can think of it, they've probably got a way to do it. It's difficult to describe what it will do for my art without writing an essay, but Blender can improve it in a whole range of subtle ways, and will put a much higher cap on what I can achieve in the images.

I've been working on getting Alex imported into Blender, and have had a little success. Though Daz is sort of a 'baby' program, its models are actually pretty complex and idiosyncratic, and they're difficult to translate well to other 3D packages. I've tried a couple of different methods and there's things I like about both; I'm currently trying to figure out how to combine the stuff I like most about each. Anyway, here's Alex under one of the methods in the viewport:

As you can see, the hair shader didn't translate properly. She still looks kinda cool with white hair, tho :)

Here's a render of it:

It looks okay (minus the hair,) but there's pretty much zero specularity (shiny parts) on the skin. And you definitely want some of that, especially on the lips. The colors are also a bit off, and there doesn't seem to be much subsurface scattering.

Here's a render of Alex converted under the other method:

Though this one looks objectively worse, there's actually more to work with here. This method is also the one that'll make it easier to transfer the, uh, naughty bits, and it seems to take up less memory, too. I'll probably go with this one for the most part. 

I want to make clear that any final images will look much, much better than these. I just thought you might find it interesting to see some in progress/behind the scenes stuff. It's obvious I'm going to have to do a lot of work on the shaders whichever method I choose, but unlike the time I hand-made 83 different versions of Ana's skin texture in Photoshop, I actually have the right tools this time! Once I get the model converted to my satisfaction in Blender, I'll start getting up to speed in Substance Painter, which is the tool made for that sort of thing. Then I'll make an image showing off all the cool new stuff I can do :D

So anyway, that's where we're at. Expect 0.9 (finally) sometime late next month.  It won't be worth the wait, but it should be good. Then a short release cycle for 0.10 to get the project over to MZ, and then on with the story! Thank you for your support!