Update 15

tl;dr - LMI release has gone great, LMI v0.3 out soon, Phinn's been delayed & I've got more PAL voice acting.

Today's picture:

I've finally put up a Masami picture! This isn't really my best, actually I'm still not happy with it, but I thought I may as well put this up because I really don't know if this scene is going to show up at all in the game. I had half an idea for the scene originally, but after experimenting with the imagery I never actually came up with a particularly interesting scene to justify it. It could still make it in, but I'm guessing right now that it probably won't.

Rio voice acting sample:

Attached at the top of the update is a small sample of Rio's voice acting. Hope you like it! I deliberately sought out an English accent for this voice, by the way, as it's part of Rio's background that she grew up in the UK.

Let Me In public alpha release:

You're probably well aware that I released a public alpha of LMI this week; in fact you may even have come on board the Patreon account thanks to that. If so, welcome! I'm really happy with how this release has gone so far, thanks (very much) to everyone for supporting and showing faith in the project.

    Anyway, that's resulted in enough activity that I've mostly been working on that game this week. I actually think a 1.0 version may not be too far off, however (I've kept the scope of the game pretty modest) so one way or another I'll be going back to work on PAL pretty soon.

    In actual news, I am expecting to release v0.3 soon (maybe later today), with the third ending implemented, some better hinting, a bunch of bug fixes and new responses.

    Hopefully you don't mind that I took a little time out to make this game; I assume you don't :)

PAL voice acting:

I've received one and a half scripts' worth of voice acting since the last update, which means I'm only now waiting on Masami (who only recently got the script), Iku (who is definitely working on it and staying in touch) and half of Ai's lines (she's sent me the other half, and has been staying in touch, she just needs more time to get the house to herself for recording sex lines, which is a common issue for actors in my games).

Developing illustration skills:

I've been interested to note how I've been developing in my skills at developing the images for games. Probably about a year ago I would have assumed that I would be making more and more animations, as I got better at doing them. Instead I'm finding that my emphasis has shifted more toward accomplishing more with Photoshop in still images.

    Photoshop is not what I use to render the 3D images, but once I have a render I take that image into Photoshop for post-work. Almost always I at least tamper with the lighting effects and brightness/contrast settings to make the image a little more rich and 'real' looking, but I've been increasing my reliance on post-work for creating backgrounds for images, as well as adding things like moisture and liquids on skin.
    I hope you like the results, of course :)

Phinn's situation:

As you probably are aware Phinn is an artistic contributor to PAL (as well as Super PAC) and doing that work pro-bono. He's not been very productive lately, and here's why (this explanation reposted from the comments on my website):

Man I have some serious catching up to do.... Quick update: Blew up another computer, that's 1 vid card and 2 mother boards sacrificed to the AIF gods this year. Unfortunately this failure blasted my primary backup hard drive as well (IE a lot of work) Fortunately all the models and textures and scratch work I had saved on another drive but many completed story boards were lost so Ill be spending the next couple of weeks redoing a lot of scenes.

Phinn

So there's not really a whole lot to be done about that other than to wish him well and hope he's able to get back up to speed soon. He's still committed to the project, and that's good enough for me.

Next week:

Any requests for next week's update? I'd love to hear them if so. What character would you like to see in a picture?