FreshmenVN

Status Update #75

Added 2025-03-10 15:07:39 +0000 UTC

Hey there, everyone. It's long past time for my first game status update for March, so here it is!

I unfortunately got very sick at the start of the month and was knocked out of commission for a while, so I didn't get anywhere near as much done as I wanted, including keeping on top of Patreon. I'll have the list of what I did get done below.

First, I want to talk about the cover image. If you follow me on Bluesky, you may have seen that Isaiah is the latest main character to get an HD upgrade. I'd been looking for new skin materials for him for a long while, and nothing I found really worked all that well. I wasn't super happy with some of the images from last month's Guy Gallery, for instance.

Based on a suggestion from the creator of Bound By Night, I tried out the materials from a figure I'd previously overlooked, and it turned out great. The new textures don't just have more detail but are also so much easier to light than other textures I tried.

Here's a side-by-side of his sprites as a comparison, with the new one on the right:

Like the updates for Leo and Riley, he's still obviously Isaiah, just upgraded to match the quality of the more recently added characters. I immediately tested him out by remaking some of his CGs, like the cover image for this post (before I knew I'd be losing time on the upcoming update).

Something I've talked about before is how much a character's textures affect how lighting looks in a scene. For darker skinned characters, I want to use highlights to define their features, so Isaiah's old skin textures not reflecting light well made the model difficult to work with, especially when he was in scenes with paler characters.

I think a good example of this is the old and new versions of his revised intro CG:

If you look at the background of each, the original was more washed out because I had to crank the lights way up to get some definition on Isaiah—and Isaiah still seemed shrouded in shadow. In the new image, I could use similar lighting but tone it down to better fit with the other orientation CGs while still making Isaiah pop as the main subject of the image.

This shower CG also had lighting cranked super high originally. The setup is the same in both images, but I was able to lower the lighting strength because of how well Isaiah looked under more normal lighting conditions.

And a few more side-by-sides just to demonstrate how much better I think he looks:

I also stumbled across a newer character model that I liked quite a bit and wanted to use. I'd been thinking about how Isaiah's nemesis, David, might develop over the course of story, and I decided to take him in a slightly different direction. Since his original model had the same problem as some others—a poor body sculpt and skin textures that didn't work well under certain lighting—I decided to use the new model I found for him.

One big change to David's design is I wanted him to be "skeezier," for story reasons. In part because he's so into being "masc" that he's trying—and failing—to grow a beard. Here's what he looks like now next to the original on the left:

Anyway, that was all a side quest I undertook for a few days before I knew how much time I'd lose on the Grind'm scenario. But I did manage to get some more pertinent stuff done the past week and a half. Here's the to-do list:

Completed Components

🟢 GENERAL 🟢

Revised Models

Alex, full revision
* David, full revision
* Isaiah, revision
NC17, tweaks
Trevor, tweaks

New Model

Henri (Matt's former roommate)
Patrick (music teacher)

Revised CGs

* Dominic/Isaiah day 2 showers
* Isaiah intro
* Isaiah day 1 tease
* Isaiah day 2 tease
* Isaiah shower teases (4 of 4 completed)

Revised Sprites

Connor's Grind'm clothes for Jordi's scenario (8 of 8 completed)
* David day 2 (8 of 8 completed)
* Isaiah day 1, day 2 afternoon, day 2 evening, underwear, & towel (41 of 41 completed)
Jordi's Grind'm clothes (5 of 5 completed)
Jordi naked erect (5 of 5 completed)