Progress update 3 (2 weeks away from freedom)

Aaaand 3rd one the charm. I wish. 

Once again, 2 weeks of pain. The university keeps being relentless, so to nobody's surprise, the progress is still slow. But as the title says, now I am 2 weeks away from finishing this year (if all goes well). so these is a silver lining I guess.

Last few days I've been feeling quite down with my game and progress, but I managed to bounce back and use that negativity for something really productive. So instead of downplaying my work and continuously comparing to other games, I took a few days to venture into uncharted territories and tried many options and settings I never did before in Honey Select (the engine I use). 

First I tried using NextGen skin shaders and textures, and as the name suggests, they are pretty high quality. I tried it only on Valentina, and after lots of adjusting she looked great, however... The shadows while using them are almost gone from renders, which bothers me quite a bit as I use shadows a lot. Also, the most pressing matter, fps. With just one Nextgen character on screen it dropped to 3-14 fps depending on scenes, and adding 2 more characters like I often have on screen is quite impossible for my current GPU. So yea, that first test for a bust, still glad I tried it.

Secondly I tried renders quality/resolution. The differences are so minimal that many might not even notice, but from ep3 on I am now changing from 1080p renders (upsampled x2) to 4k renders converted to 1080p. It's basically the same, but some slight details like hair seem to be better on the 2nd method.

And third, but most important, actual presets/lights/etc. changes. I tried a lot of things and I held a big poll on Discord (technically 7 polls) and around ~100 people responded for each option. which was awesome. Tldr of the polls is:
With these polls, I can confidently conclude few things. One, Valentina will get her slight face change from next episode onwards. Two, vast majority of you is in favor of the changes regarding usage of bloom/lights/colors. Three, the more dramatic changes, basically changing presets and render style is not welcome. And four, no, I don't plan to remake Episode 1 images even though I compared some of them here in anytime soon.
You can see some of the new renders and new approaches on them (New vs Old, in that order). Overall, I am happy I tried this, as I learnt quite a few new things while also pushing myself outside of my usual comfort zone.
Not much but this is it for this progress update. As mentioned on the previous update, the next 2 weeks are absolutely crucial, which, unfortunately, means there will be no progress update nor any real work done on the game in those 2 weeks. That means the next progress update will be in roughly 1 months time.
Thank you everyone for your understanding, and I hope the next time I post is with the news of me passing the year.
Kat