Upcoming updates, backgrounds and a game guide

Hey everyone!

Just giving you all an update so that you know what's going on.

I am a couple of updates behind, so I am playing catchup right now. I'll be doing overtime this month to try and get these out, and the next snack tier update is already well underway.

With the coming update, there are two new characters: Paige's step-mom and dad, and a new location: Paige's house. I believe I have finished most of the art for this one and this time the backgrounds may not be placeholders for a change.

As you may be aware from previous updates, I have been working on getting a nice professional-looking and consistent style for the game's backgrounds. With each update I have been learning to use AI to get to this, using the results as placeholder backgrounds as I go. My goal was to get something of a crisp 3D rendered look that still fits with the illustrative style of the character art.

I think we're almost there, although there are still some errors here and there. One of the problems with AI, especially when it comes to environments, is that it makes a lot of geometric errors that are only noticeable after looking at the image for a little while. Even though I can generate something that looks quite nice rather quickly, I still have to spend hours eliminating these problems whilst being careful not to lose details which I might have liked in the original generation.

Another problem is that it is not so easy to generate the exact same images but with different lighting for different times of day. Originally I had thought that I would build the environments in 3D to make this all easier, but the likelihood that I'll find the time to learn how to do that and then recreate the entire town is a fairly low at the moment while I'm still trying to get more interesting updates out.

I am investigating a method of adjusting the lighting with AI, although it may still take a while to adjust the details of each image if I go down this route.

There is also a game guide in the works, which will show every path in the game so far and how to get through each one. This should eliminate any problems players have with finding new content in the game and knowing when a particular path has ended in the current update. There are rather a lot of paths already though, so this is taking a bit of time too.

Do let me know what you think of the backgrounds, and whether they are suitable for the game. If you notice any errors in the above images which I might have missed, do feel free to point them out! (Note: the paintings on the wall will be replaced with family portraits and such.)