The H-Scene (Again) (Patreon)

Greetings! First, I want to say I’m very sorry for the long delay in posting. As is usually the case when you don’t hear from me for a while, I was working on something that I wanted to have finished before posting, so that I could report it was complete, and it ended up taking (much) longer than expected. And the longer I go without posting, the harder it is to post without being done... so it’s sort of a vicious circle. I need to find a better way to deal with this, but I haven’t really figured out what it is yet. Anyway, I’m going to stop apologizing because I don’t want this to be a downer to read, but I am very sorry!

The thing I was trying to complete was the H-scene. Last time I'd reported that the images were complete, but that the writing and eventing and such were not. The bad news is that it took so long to finish, but the good news is that it is now (finally!) complete. Why did it take so long? Most of this was down to the writing, although I did end up doing a lot more work on the art which I'll cover below.

The Writing

Why did the writing take so long? There are a few reasons, but I'll start with the most important one: because of what happens in the scene, it would have been very easy for it to turn out in a way that I and probably you wouldn't be happy with. I can't tell you exactly what the problem is without spoiling some of the scene. I will say, though, that Val was always intended as a possible love interest for the player character, not a love interest for Ana, and this scene is supposed to clearly establish that. How do you write a femdommy threesome scene where both of the NPCs are supposed to be love interests, but without either being all that interested in the other, and where nobody's incredibly pissed off or hurt at the end? Well... it's hard. At least it was for me. I think it turned out pretty well, but it was a real struggle getting there.

The second reason is that the scene is very long. The whole scene is about 13k words - which isn't War and Peace, but it ain't a listicle blog post, either! (Actually, it's about 2.2% of War and Peace. At least in length, probably not in literary quality.) The scene is so long because the image set is so large. If you like the game you'll probably like the scene, but this was a good reminder of why I always tried to aim for 15 images per set (as opposed to the 25 in this one.)

The final reason is that it's difficult for me to write erotica. Odd thing for someone who makes an H-game to say, but it's true. Making erotic images isn't too bad, but the writing is tough. I find it much harder to write prose than dialogue, and writing erotica is a lot like writing prose, just with lots of throbbing things and silky folds and whatnot. Sometimes I can write erotica at a pretty good clip, but I have to be in a certain mood, and I haven't yet figured out how to control or predict when that will be. Otherwise, it's a pretty hard slog.

But, it's over, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Hopefully you will be, too!

The Images

The issue with the images is that I ended up redoing a fair bit of work. In the course of writing the scene, I noticed a few mistakes (hair mysteriously disappearing into objects, expressions not quite up to snuff, etc.) that forced me to re-render a few scenes. The bigger issue, though, was the postwork.

The last post said a lot of nice things about Affinity Photo, a Photoshop alternative that I initially used to do postwork for this scene. Most of what I said still stands, but I've since come to think Affinity isn't a true replacement for Photoshop, at least for my workflow. Affinity does a tiny number of things better, but not much better, and there's a lot of things it does worse. Sometimes substantially so. It's not that there's a lot of things Affinity can't do, it's just that you can do them faster in Photoshop, and in some cases better. It's still really good, and it's definitely the closest thing to Photoshop, but it's not Photoshop.

Why does this matter? One of the images I had to rerender involved something (very basic) Affinity doesn't handle well, and for which I had to do janky and time-consuming workarounds. Not wanting to repeat that, I went ahead and got a Photoshop subscription. The image turned out better than the previous one, even excepting the janky part, and I came to think the other images would look better done with Photoshop, too. (This turned out to be true.) So after redoing a few, and seeing the difference it made, I decided to redo all of them.

This was a lot of work, but probably not as much as it sounds like. I was able to reuse a lot of what had been done before in Affinity, and I'm able to work much faster in Photoshop, anyway. Most of the images didn't take very long individually (though a couple did), it's just that there were 25 of them.

What's Next and Conclusion

I'm very glad that the H-scene is finally, truly done. Though the writing was difficult, it was actually kinda nice getting back to it after spending so long on the art. It's got me pretty excited to get back to work on the long quest, which is the biggest thing remaining for the next release.

At present, the following remains to be done:

1. The long quest (~50% done)
2. A small quest
3. Some nightclub conversations
4. Various detail work
5. Editing and testing

So, that's where we are. I've spent far, far longer on the H-scene - both art and writing - than I'd hoped to, but it's over now. And I think it's pretty good! I'm very sorry for the long delay in posting. Would you guys rather receive more frequent posts that maybe have less to report, or less frequent ones with more to report? Please let me know! And thank you very much for your support and patience!