General Update

Sorry for being a bit silent folks :-p. I've been bashing my head against the wall that is starting the Chastity Quest project. I'm making progress, just not as fast as I'd hoped...

As far as the story for the game goes, I actually have almost the entire first major section of the game mapped out. I've also, as you can see above in the images, created the first character populating that section of the story. Jillian(working name) runs the magic shop in the frontier/adventurer town, and as such will actually appear in the intro as well, which I already have most of the images for. Indeed, both of the non-character-creation images above are actual images intended for use in the game's intro section! Sadly, well that part has gone well, the issues have, irritatingly, been technical problems. I had ironed out a LOT of the technical stuff before I ever proposed the game, but two issues have popped up. 

One, regarding which engine to use for the actual game, was kinda expected. It seems I go through this phase with every new game, before finally settling one whichever engine pisses me off the least -_-. Unfortunately, it's been particularly bad this time, as I've been bound and determined NOT to go back to Ren'py. I could PROBABLY pull the game off in TWINE, as I have with DoL, but doing so would be a pretty big headache as the game is a lot less linear, which is something TWINE isn't great for. So, since the last update, I've been through and multiple engines trying to find something that doesn't suck and can do everything I need. I think I've FINALLY found one that I might be happy with but i'm still playing with it. Moreover...it's a paid engine :-(. Right now, I'm playing with a copy on loan to me from someone else, just to see if it will work out. If it does, I'll have to shell out $60 to actually get it for myself -_-. Oh well, if it makes me hate the coding portion less, that's acceptable, I suppose.

The OTHER technical issue I've been bashing my head against wasn't expected and has been right royally pissing me the hell off. Simply put, I can't find any non-buggy way to take control of an NPC character in Skyrim for screenshot purposes! ARG. I didn't think that was going to be an actual issue. Surprise, surprise, the only mod I've found that does it (Alternate Actors) is old and so $&^%#& buggy as hell that it's utterly unusable. Which has left me stuck with trying to maneuver and manipulate NPCs with a few posing mods...which don't do some of things I want and are an awkward solution, at best. I may just have to settle for less-than-ideal results for some things. In example, I can't figure out a way to have an NPC cast something for visual effect purposes, since I can't take control of them directly and posing idles and such don't seem to come with visual effects... Grr.

Anyway, I'm still working on that issue. Though, I have managed to resolve a third one regarding the custom characters themselves, I think. It's proving harder than I'd hoped to make the characters I need or, rather, more involved than I'd hoped. There's apparently no easy way to modify an existing NPC with the character creator tools, so what I'm doing instead is a like 400000 step process to make original(ish) standalone followers for each major 'character' I need.

Even with the issues, I STILL think that using a heavily modded Skyrim is going to be a LOT faster than trying to make everything I need in Daz3D. While looking just as good or sometimes better. I'm just still getting over a few technical hurdles. Once I can resolve them, I should be able to get rolling at a decent production speed.

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In other news, the poll for this month's Story Reward did, of course, finish. For the curious, DoL: Origins of a Merchant Princess won this time, so I'll be getting started on it sometime in the next few days. I'm also considering trying to get ahead of the DoL curve for next month, as December is always hectic. I've sorted out what I want to do regarding the focus poll, I think (which means it'll be up in a day or two), and what I've settled on would technically let me start early.

Whether I do that or not will likely depend on how much more time I'm forced to pour into solving the technical issues with Chastity Quest. My goal for that game this month is to have ALL the technical issues ironed out, the NPC's needed for the first major area of the game all created(6 major characters and a number of generic-ish ones), and the intro section 100% done. If that all happens, I may actually release the intro as a teaser. It'll be a bit limited, though, since there's no choices or anything in the intro :-). Still, it'll be something to show you lot where things are headed.