Art Going Forward, and a Patron-Exclusive Preview

First off, if you haven't seen it yet, there is a new download link on the discord for a preview-demo of the new art style. Secondly, yeah, there's a new art style!

For the past month I have been spending a lot of time setting up character models to use going forward in scene renders. These renders will be used much like the early artwork provided by Garrisen, except with more detail in the models and more images in general. In order to achieve this goal, I've been taking advisement from Garrisen on how to best optimize my own render pipeline. I've also been learning a lot about Gimp and post-processing renders. It's been exciting and also nerve-racking, luckily I have some years experience working in Daz3D so I'm not starting completely from scratch and Garrisen has been a wonderful teacher.

There's an obvious point to be made here, if these new renders can't be done quickly and efficiently while still putting out a decent quality then it becomes less of a fun addition to the game and more of a timesink. As I type this, no new content, story, or gameplay has been added to the game, and that kind of makes me sad. Because of this we won't be dropping the minimalistic style. The goal is to provide more immersion through imagery, not to replace the text adventure style or hinder progress in development. I got into text-adventures because they allowed me to focus on story and gameplay while not having to worry about graphics and I don't intend to forget that

Going forward, I will be taking a lot more control over the artwork pipeline. The reality is Garrisen has quite a lot on his plate right now jugging more than one project. This has the benefit of me being able to craft each scene exactly as I imagine them, with the obvious downside being that new content may take longer to come out as I am now responsible for the bulk of the work.

Still, I feel confident and excited. With all the models for current in-game characters made, it's as simple as posing and rendering the scenes. In the preview-demo posted today, all of the images for Anna's climbing scene were rendered and rammed through Gimp in just two days. The intro scene took maybe a week and a lot of that could easily be chalked up to the learning curve and me cutting my teeth on the new systems and tools. Even though there are still a few renders left to complete for Anna's scenario, many of those renders will be used again in future encounters with Anna, for efficiency's sake! And that's the plan going forward, as many renders as possible will be re-used as appropritate to save time and limit file size.

So, this has been a bit of a disjointed, meandering post. I'm a little tired if I'm being honest and maybe should have waited until the morning to write this post. But hey, I've never been exactly great with time-management. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oh! And don't forget, patrons can now submit bios to become random NPCs in the game! The first round of patron-submissions has already been added to the game. You might encounter yourself or another patron in the preview! You can see the post below or check out the discord for more details on how to become an NPC.

As always, thoughts, criticisms, suggestions, questions, concerns... all are welcome and appreciated and I'll do my best to respond to all of them.

The link to download the new preview demo is on the discord. Because of the adult nature of the game, no links will be provided here on the patreon.