A Likely Story! (Patreon)

Greetings! Work continues on 0.10; I've been dividing development time roughly 50/50 between working on the long quest and working on H-scene images. The above is one of the scene's early images - I hope you like it! I really liked doing this one - I spent quite a while working on the expressions, and I'm mostly pleased with how they turned out. I was going to give a brief description of what's going on, but I don't want to give much away, and hopefully you can already guess from the picture! I wish you could see more of Alex's adorable sheep pajamas, but there's other images for that :)

The H-scene for this release is shaping up to be quite a bit bigger than I'd originally thought; the plan was to have a roughly 15 image scene, but it's now expanded to (tentatively) 25 images. This will make it one of the larger H-scenes in terms of number of images, but I really felt I needed that many to tell the story. There's been even more redecoration of Val's room since the teaser image I showed last time, and though you can only see part of it here, I like it much better. "Floors should be darker than walls" is an interior design rule of thumb I hadn't been aware of, but which goes a long way in explaining why I always thought her room looked a little off. I created an alternate version of her room that looks much newer and nicer, which certainly suits Val's personality, but the Bunnies are supposed to be kind of poor, with a mildly run-down guild hall. I thought that was a pretty important aspect of the guild, so I decided not to use it. The one I'm using now looks like someone really tried to spruce up a room in a run-down old keep, which is probably about what it ought to be.

I had a bit of a rough time with Alex and Ana's hair in the above image. Alex's in particular didn't denoise properly (i.e., it looked super grainy,) so I had to employ some dark arts in Photoshop to get it to not look like doodoo. Their hair has been a thorn in my side for quite a while, ever since a Daz update sometime during 0.8's development broke it. The idea of replacing them with real strand-based hair is what got me looking at Blender in the first place. I might give their Daz hair another look now that I know more about 3D and shaders and stuff to see if I can do a better fix. I've already rendered several images, but rendering them again isn't a problem with my current system (well, aside from the heat!)

Oh, and last 3D-related thing - I've finally started playing here and there with Marvelous Designer, the 3D clothes-making software. Don't worry, I haven't spent much time on it - getting 0.10 done is my focus now - but I did manage to make my first dress with it. The 3D parts are surprisingly easy once you know what all the buttons do, the rest of the problems are the problems of actual tailoring: what bits of fabric do I need to cut, and how should I sew them together to get this outfit I want? If any of you have a country grandma, she could probably make a killing selling 3D clothes if you can teach her how to use it! Granted, she probably didn't make space hooker or fetish elf outfits back in her day, but I'm sure she could figure it out if the price was right!

I'm also continuing to chop away at The Hell's quest, the long quest for this release. Like the recruitment quest in 0.9, this one involves a small town, so it's a bit of work to get it set up and lifelike. Unlike Cape Hope, this town isn't really intended to be a place you'll want to come back and visit (you'll see why,) so I'm not investing quite as much time there as in the previous town. The two quests have a pretty different feel; the Cape Hope quest was about getting to know the townsfolk; this one's about getting to know The Hell. This is a little bit of a challenge to write; I'm still kinda struggling with how much to make them likable versus unlikable. At least a few members of the guild have already proven themselves to be inveterate jerks (as when a couple picked on Jovi early on) but others, when you met them at The Dark Pits, didn't seem that bad. What kinds of dynamics would a group like that have, where some folks are real bell ends, but others aren't? Why do the non-jerks put up with the jerks?

Anyway, I just wanted to share some of the things I've been working on, and some of the game-related challenges I've been dealing with. I'm trying to get this quest and H-scene done, so I'm going to get back to it. Thank you for your support!