Update - 5 September 2016

tl;dr - I made new combat graphics and worked more on the Masami/Kimiko threesome. Then I released PAL alpha 0.12.0! Also I'm sick, and I talk a little about future plans.

This week's image

This is a new image from this week that I made for the Masami/Kimiko scene! Probably no explanation is necessary. :)

Alpha v0.12.0 released!

Next up, the game's endings! And being sick! Yeah, I'm still in rough shape, I've got a doctor's appointment and I think I need antibiotics. Oh, well. Anyway, the next objective I'm focussing on is creating the final parts of the main storyline, the Rising and final battle, and then the girls' individual epilogues.

That said, the harem ending will not be included in the next update because that's a bigger project.

Completed the combat graphics

I finally put in some work on the combat graphics this week. The idea of doing that was pretty boring to me, but fortunately I'd done some of the work already. I did at least need to find 3D models or just good stock image substitutes for all of the monsters. I'm still not happy with the slime, but all the others seem good to me now.

Anyway, what I had to do was render some images and also add in stuff to the game. With this process I also found myself making a few little tweaks to the audio/visual qualities of the combat scenes, and also a couple of other moments involving monsters. I also had to make a bunch of animated graphics so you'll get some fun, more active moments in the combat system.

Ultimately I kind of feel that the combat graphics aren't as good as I imagined they could be, but they should be good enough. I still personally rather prefer the combat graphics of PAF, which had a nicely consistent artistic design with the graphics window turned into a kind of display screen. With PAL I went for something vaguely inspired by Pokemon and it worked okay, but, well... you can judge for yourself.

Completed the Masami/Kimiko threesome

While I didn't do anything radical with this I did find previously that there were some sex commands in the Masami/Kimiko threesome that gave no response. I also had some remaining 'orphaned' images from Phinn that didn't have a use yet. Therefore I decided to add a few more responses to the sex scene and add several more images, some from Phinn and a couple from me. Also, the scene had been feeling a little sparse without that extra work, so that was the other incentive.

Naturally, after having worked on both the combat graphics and the threesome, I had to do testing as well, which takes time.

Future plans for upgrades

I've been thinking about some of my future plans and I just thought I'd let you know what I'm thinking I'll do in the future in terms of investing in better game development resources.

For a start, you may remember I planned a while back to shift to Aiko 6 (a more advanced base female character model for my characters) but I put that on hold because I was concerned about the lack of good resources for her. Well, Aiko 7 is out now so there's little incentive to go for 6 and I plan instead to jump straight to Aiko 7 when I make the change. For now I have character designs mostly complete for Let Me Out and my next project after that, both of which I've done in Aiko 4 and I think they look good, so the Aiko 7 change over will happen after that.

I've mentioned in my next fundraising goal that I plan to get a platinum club membership for Daz3D, which will provide long-term savings if I invest in a lot of 3D resources. I do plan on buying a variety of fancy models and environments for more complicated and hopefully more beautiful rendering. That will go hand in hand with upgrading the character model because I'm going to need to also get a whole bunch more clothes, hairstyles and character skins.

Finally, if I'm rendering complex characters in complex environments that's going to really start to strain my computer's graphics hardware. You may recall I upgraded my computer a while back to make it possible to render images in Iray (hence a major improvement in the visuals). Well, I did get a good PC and I am now capable of Iray rendering, but even with this rig my system does strain when dealing with really complicated scenes. The GTX970 graphics card is good enough most of the time, but I think eventually I'm just going to have to invest in a real beast of a machine with, I don't know, maybe dual GTX1080s or something.

Twitter: @BBBenAIF
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