Crescent Bay Broadcast - September 25, 2026

Hey guys. It's been a year. Long time no see.

First of all, I am sorry for disappearing. When I first set the vacation mode, I thought that I was just in a bit of a rut and would get back to work pretty quickly. A one-month pause to de-stress, maybe two, and I would come back ready and motivated. Clearly, that didn't happen, and after a few months, it just became a ritual of extending the date. At the start, there was still some progress (albeit slow, which was the reason I enabled vacation mode to begin with), but over time it kept tapering off, and it has been at zero for a while now.

A lot has changed. My personal life has changed in tremendous ways I could never have foreseen, and the adult games industry as a whole has seen some harmful changes as well.

While I love the TSoH story and characters that I have in my head, and I still do want to tell my story one way or another, I have to acknowledge that it will not be soon, and to be honest with myself and you all, it likely will not be in the same form it is now. I enjoy making characters, designing sets, and obsessing over the small details in a hair or skin shader, but I simply dread posing, and it was one of the major contributors to the demo being short and the slow progress later on.

TSoH will likely be back someday, but it won't be soon, and it will likely be in a different medium. It might still be a VN, but if so, more than likely a sprite-based VN with stylized graphics, or it may be something else entirely.

I am not exiting the adult industry entirely. While not under my Amberlight Studio name, my mods will remain maintained, and my Discord will remain open. I intend to be easy to reach for the foreseeable future.

Thank you for being a part of TSoH over the last two years. I intend to be back someday.

https://discord.gg/wdhUJ2Qz79

Crescent Bay Broadcast - June 28, 2025

Hey, guys. Unfortunately I don't have much to say this month. These last few weeks haven't been great for me mentally, and I haven't had any drive to get any Blender work done for this time. IRL, I've also been dealing with a thief problem which has eaten up much of my time. Luckily, I haven't noticed anything missing (especially nothing of value), however I've had to spend a significant amount of time moving stuff to safer spaces, installing more Claymores cameras, and improving sightlines. Even then, I still think I need a few more cameras and further work done.

Now, it's not as if nothing at all has happened. Despite my mind not being in a state to work on visuals, it has an odd quirk where being sad makes me want to write. As such, I've been working on the script.

There were a lot of rewrites and amendments made, and some more progress overall. One more important rewrite that comes to mind is that of a rather minor plot point that turned into a major pain. Originally, I intended to have a key character (Dave) leave Crescent Bay for the duration of the story, however I've now found that actually works against against the main story that I want to tell. It turns out he is actually a very interesting character and getting rid of him is a tremendous waste. As such, that plot point has been removed and rethought.

Additionally, some of my more challenging scenes had some progress on their writing, and there were some additional "idea" scenes written which may or may not end up used in later chapters.

Just about every scene has had some sort of amendment (some major and others very minor), and there were some further changes made on my many, many outlining documents.

Now that all said, as effectively all the progress this month has just been in text, I don't have any images to attach to this post. I guess I could attach a very blurry image of VSCode or the result of git diff --stat, but I don't believe there's very much interest in either of those. :)

Crescent Bay Broadcast - May 23, 2025

Hey, guys. This month has been kinda shitty, and I haven't gotten as much done as I would have liked since the last update, but there is still some stuff to talk about, so let's do that.

I've largely been working on modeling. I briefly went back to the environment from March and threw together some nodes which allowed me to replace the concrete barriers with guard rails. I really like how it came out. For those interested, I made a (paid) post about the node group which has a bit more information as well as the nodes themselves. (I'll be using that tool more than you probably expect.)

Lately, I've also been working on modeling Crescent Bay itself. Crescent Bay is a rather small town nestled up against the coastline and built into the hills. It can effectively be divided into four main sections which can each be done separately, and of which two are required for Chapter 1, with the others only being needed later on.

1. The main road is a rather large section with a lot of visibility. As such, this one will be a rather large project.
2. The cabin where MC is staying is in the corner of town, where there isn't much going on. The surroundings can be easily handled with my terrain and plant tools, but the structure itself will likely be a challenge if I can't find a sufficient model online.
3. Housing "A" is where Alice lives. I am not entirely certain yet on what I want it to look like, so we'll figure it out it when we get there.
4. Housing "B" is where Katie lives. My plans for it are quite firm, and while it's far from a small project, it shouldn't be too extreme. The terrain can easily be done procedurally, and I actually did a rough sketch of some of the houses several months ago.

(There's also an additional environment outside of Crescent Bay which must be modeled for CH1, but that one should hopefully be rather trivial as I think my asset collection covers most, if not all, of it.)

The work recently has been on the very start of #1. Some pieces of the town need to be custom modeled (these last couple of days have been spent modeling a bridge), but hopefully I can find some assets to purchase for the buildings so that I can avoid having to model everything.

Crescent Bay Broadcast - April 14, 2025

Hey, guys. I'm trying to break that dastardly pattern I had where I was posting every other month, despite stating at the beginning that I'd "like to make one to two each month." For better or worse, however, that means that I'll be writing a lot more about things I tried that simply failed.

So my attempt at redoing Jess' model failed and fell flat on its face. (Insert a pained laugh here.) My main focus was her hair since that was what I was least pleased with, and below is what I came up with. And the feedback was... almost universally negative. Fair enough.

Some people just aren't fans of the short hair and preferred the longer one. A couple others pointed out that she looks very similar to Ines from STWA: Unbroken. While I don't know all the assets Stew uses for her, I do know that hair asset is the exact same. In fact, I previously avoided using it specifically because of that recognition. (Note: If you haven't heard of or played Unbroken, check it out. Stew makes great games and I strongly recommend them.)

Now to be fair with myself, I do think she's very cute and while there are significant problems with this hair, I actually do quite like it. But since just about everyone prefers what I had before, I'll roll back to that. (Note: Between the purple and white stripe from the last post, I decided on the white one.)

Sidenote: While I was working on porting this new hair from Daz to Blender, I made some optimizations to my cards to curves conversion tool which improves performance and gives me a few more artistic controls to play with. At least something useful came out of all this.