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Dev Log #11 | Big news, big hopes, big renders, big yap, slow progress | Teaser of the "7th"
Hey everyone!
This month has been an absolute roller coaster for me and development, but I will say that things have taken a much better turn which will be helpful in the long-run. I'd also like to say thank you to everyone, you guys are always super supportive - your encouragement and faith in me and my vision for Aether means the world to me.
I'll start and say - shout out to my good friend and fellow developer Dark Seraph, who has just released his phenomenal plugins to the entire HS2 community. He has been working on multiple tools which will be immensely helpful for all developers. I've been a tester of his plugins for the last few months and I must say - the future is very bright for HS2 AVNs in terms of potential. Sometimes I dove deep into new technical areas and pushed things as much as I could, testing what may be possible and while it took quite a bit of time, it also taught me a lot of things on the technical side, something which feels like a never ending book of knowledge.
Renders and lighting
This is something which I feel honestly embarrassed to admit, but I realized that the way I've approached rendering has to change because I'm producing simply bad renders. I'm not blind myself and if you've seen any of my wallpapers or special renders etc., then it's obvious that I can make better art than how my story renders have been turning out (example renders later in this post - wash your eyes after).
So, what went wrong?
It's a combination of a few things: I looked into lighting theory a while ago, but truthfully, I forgot about most of it and I started really just relying on my intuition on how to light up scenes. On top of that, I was never actually knowledgeable about Unity 2018's lighting logic nor about certain things inside the Graphics plugin we have in HS2. But I will skip the deeply technical and boring stuff. Perhaps sometimes I just got lucky with some renders, hence why I could produce things that looked good enough where I was happy with them, or perhaps it was something else. Nevertheless, the lighting technique that I used - which was just winging it like when you didn't study for an exam but you'd try bullshitting your way through it anyways - was inefficient, imperfect and caused me to do several reworks of entire scenes. Another problem that crept into my work was that for some reason I had this idea that my lighting and my renders should look realistic, which meant I often tried simulating realistic lighting, but I always struggled with it immensely. Pair that with me wanting to push myself to just get renders done as soon as I could because I thought that I have to get the Prologue released ASAP, made me start scrambling and instead of slowing down and reassessing or having the ability to realize I wasn't happy with the way I was rendering, I pushed on.
I pushed on and I became blind to my own work, something that I pride myself in, that I'm able to be more objective and assess the quality of my work with a reduced bias, was nowhere to be found. I got so lost in that pressure bearing down on me from above, which I summoned there myself, that I ignored things which I knew or wanted, and quite simply they made my standards to drop in unreasonable ways. I say unreasonable, because my stupid perfectionism was still present. I was looking at fixing problems that were minuscule compared to the glaring red flag which was in my face, screaming at me from every single pixel of each render - shit lighting.
As I struggled with my bad lighting technique, I started relying way too much on ambient lighting to simulate bouncing light - which was my obsession regarding realistic lighting and it can only be "hand-simulated" in HS2. What I ended up with were often flat, plain, boring looking renders, which may have had a level of realism to them in terms of lighting because bouncing light is indeed powerful in real life - but it doesn't matter how realistic they may look when those renders are just simply unappealing to look at. There is a reason why cinematographers, photographers or professional 3D artists etc. all know that realistic lighting looks unimpressive, and what you need is lighting with purpose, something that can often feel cinematic or dramatic.
What's the solution and why?
At the time of me going down this path of reassessing my art style and lighting technique, I had 362 finished renders. However, as I said before, with an inefficient technique, I ended up doing reworks of scenes because I was unhappy with their looks and I just couldn't get what I wanted. I had a vision, but I didn't have the skills or the patience to pursue those visuals. In total, I have 632 renders of all the scenes done so far (this is with all duplicate versions), which means about 43% of the renders I did ended up in the bin. This is because it happened multiple times that after I rendered out a scene, I went back and reworked it with slightly tuned lighting here-and-there. Again, not meaningful changes as I wasn't sure how to get the look I wanted, I just felt unhappy about them and so I tried something.
If I was to move from one style to another, it would be a rather polarizing experience, therefore I had decided that I have to rework all existing renders - I know... already in rework hell even before release. However, I'd rather do this now before my first release than not address the problem for months or years, leading to a situation where instead of having to remaster a few hundred renders, it would be thousands. That's one of those cases where suddenly the waiting time triples or quadruples between two releases compared to previous ones because I'm doing a massive rework - and I know you guys don't want that, and I don't either.
Before reworking all story renders, I studied lighting theory and I instantly went into practicing, hoping that I could finally be able to capture the visual style I've always wanted but didn't have the skills before to achieve.
With reworking all renders from the ground up, I knew it was an opportunity to make more changes as I got some new tools and new knowledge since I rendered out these first scenes. I wanted to knock out not two birds with one stone, but several. Because of this, the learning experience when I was practicing the new visuals wasn't just about different lighting but a whole heap of other stuff too, but at least it finally all makes sense after all the practice (again, I'll skip the boring technical stuff). I also committed to using a different facial type for all main girls - it basically means a different style of facial expressions with more detail, and I also made some changes to Hector (our protagonist). I've always felt that I couldn't capture that vision I had for Hector's character with his previous design and while the changes are subtle, I think the overall feel of his character is much closer to what I had originally envisioned for him.
Explaining things can only go so far, so I believe it's better if I show examples of story renders - comparisons between some of the old story renders, and the new reworked ones.
(I'll look away now because I'm embarrassed... and yes, the style change is significant)
Those are some of the story renders which I've picked out to show, this inadvertently turned into a bit of a sneak peek collection, but hence why I've used examples only from the first 2 scenes.
The art direction is different from before, and I'd love to hear your honest thoughts on things. Do you like the changes, dislike them, share anything you can think of - I'm very open to feedback (and if people hate it, that doesn't mean I'll rework again, it will just mean that certain elements of this style would have a narrative purpose in the beginning and changes would come later).
Honestly, I'm sorry for having been so inefficient. I want the same thing as all of you - to finally see Aether's first release ready, so we may start our long and beautiful journey in this world. I'm working on getting better and better and with the reworks and all the practice I've been doing I can see that as I go into any scene, I set up lighting with a goal and purpose in mind, rather than scrambling around not knowing how I could get it to look good enough. Efficiency is very important as a solo developer, and I can see that just knowing the theory and applying it can significantly reduce the time of fucking around with various settings as I try to fix something which will be inherently broken. It feels awesome that when something is messed up, I know exactly why that is, and when it comes to fixing it where to go, what to change, what to tune and how to go about it overall.
This type of work involves continuously learning and improving skills, and it's extremely rewarding and fun to do so. At this point, I'm very happy with the direction I've taken, which means I can avoid endlessly going back to completed scenes and reworking because I'm never satisfied with them.
My honest thoughts
I've said this before in our Discord server, but I'll say it in this post as well. I've always wanted to avoid doing massive reworks. They are awfully taxing on the developer, risky for a project and torturous for the passionate community. Even if things are massively improved after all that hard work and long waiting, it can taint the experience and the feelings people have about a project. Regarding this situation now, I just want to do my best so even later when my skills have improved further, I won't feel the need to rework stuff.
Doing this "mini rework" now is taking quite long, but this is actually mostly about me learning, getting better and changing style and workflow in many ways. I'm genuinely glad I took a step back to evaluate things now than let things get out of control. And sure, some may say that it's not a must to rework things, and I respect that, but for me personally - I want to be proud of my work.
I fucking love what I do with Aether and if I'm not allowed to enjoy it because the work I create feels mediocre to me while I know I can do better but I decide it's good enough, then I don't feel the same fulfillment as when I aim high and try my absolute best. I went into this whole project with a certain mentality and settling for things would go against that and my own principles. For me, this journey is a learning experience and a path towards personal development as well and I want to be able to embrace that. I admit, currently I may not even be good in certain areas of making a visual novel right now, but what I do know is that I'm willing to learn and willing to improve. I want to try and create the best stuff I can, which is damn hard, especially for someone who went into this whole thing with absolutely no knowledge of any of the creative aspects in the field.
I can see people criticizing my view on things, saying that I should "just work on the damn game" and not bother with it not being perfect and just to put out as much content as possible, as that is the correct way to go about things. And that's fine, I respect that. But I can't lie to myself, and I can't lie to the passion that drives me every single day.
Aether is not a small project, so it will go on for years obviously (just like most solo VN projects really). So, I'm in this for the long haul. I don't want to rush things in general, but especially not in the beginning as I'm still trying to find my groove.
But of course, I'm worried every single day that I'm spending too long on an introductory chapter, and considering the journey we have in front of us, I want to speed things up so the main story can start in full-force. So, with this rework of renders, I have taken the opportunity to try and be more efficient with render count by cutting redundant renders, but also to cut back on the length of the Prologue a little. Not sure how big the difference will be just yet, and I don't want things to feel rushed, but I'm going to try to strike a good balance.
Well, that was alot, thank you for reading. Again, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the new visuals or anything else you have in mind.
Much love to everyone, thank you from the bottom of my heart for believing in me and Aether, and thank you for your continuous support!
-Khronarch
TEASER #?
A⸻⸻
"Born last of the seven."
"Hast thou no shame for what destruction thy existence hath brought forth into this Reality?"
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Hello!
Hope you've all been well! We hit double digit Dev Logs?! That's crazy. There are lots of topics to talk about, so let's jump into things.
Schedule
I'm going to move Dev Logs to a monthly schedule for the time being. The reason for this is that I always get anxious about wanting to show progress in these posts and currently I don't feel I could show enough every 2 weeks, sorry about that. I'll see how things change in my personal life and if I can go back to bi-weekly posts or not. I probably should've done this earlier (like the last Dev Log), but I thought about it for longer instead. This means that Dev Log #11 will be a month from now.
Render progress in numbers
We're up to 350 renders and 2 animations.
I've been doing a bit practicing for animating bodies to prepare for that lewd scene in the Prologue - which I'd love to make into something I can be proud of. I still need to improve a lot but it's a really exciting experience overall.
Development plan
I've been rather worried about the fact that I can't seem to gauge the pacing or size of certain scenes and that caused me a lot of headaches.
Because of this, I came up with the idea to put together everything in ren'py every 5 scenes which I render out. This would mean putting it all together via code, adding audio, transitions etc. This way I can go through them in full and see what kind of experience you all will have, helping me understand better where I need to improve things.
So, to prepare for this, I've started doing some coding, organizing stuff and testing with Scene#1 how I would put everything together. Coding is challenging part for me in this entire project and I know I'd lose my mind if I had to do all of it at the very end of the dev cycle, it being the last thing before release/testing - because of this I really believe doing it in segments will be helpful for me.
Additionally, perhaps it can also serve as a small milestone where I can feel proud of what I have so far? I don't know... just also trying to come up with things to tackle my impostor syndrome.
Other progress
Lore, narrative and universe design
This is actually where a considerable amount of my time went recently. I'm never happy with what I create and also being a very visual person, my renders have been eating at my mind. I felt it was needed, but also some fellow developer friends have recommended just taking a break. However, I'd feel weird and empty not doing anything related to Aether during a day (or multiple). So, instead I did a test where I told myself that I'm not allowed to open the studio at all. Instead, I opened up my notes and thought - if I can do some narrative or universe design or write the script, that's great, if not, then I'm allowing my brain to rest.
I didn't rest much, partially perhaps because I enjoyed going back to this workflow so much that the initial 1 day test turned into more and I'll probably implement it into my schedule, hoping that long-term this will help out with progress.
Universe design, which I essentially consider to be the history of the world, working out the underlying logic of how the world works, the ontology and metaphysical aspects etc., is something that's become one of my favorite aspects of writing.
Considering I'm building a very lore-heavy and dense universe, there's a lot of work to be done in this realm. My general attitude with things is that if a question should arise in the mind of a reader while experiencing the story, then there should be an answer - yes, this is nearly impossible, but just attempting this will pay off. There are loads of things in my universe that have gone through significant changes, as over the past year or so I've added more and more detail to everything. And slowly but surely I'm tackling the few outlined main/most important lore points which I still have to address in detail, ideally before Chapter 1/2 (although there are elements that would need some work for the Prologue as well).
The main girls' first designs
In light of hitting double digits in Dev Logs, I thought to go down memory lane for a bit.
I've already done a bit of a teaser with Sofia and Leila in the past as tier benefits, but I realized I'm too passionate about development itself to not want to share stuff like this with everyone. I'll show some side-by-sides of the main girls today (always on the left) vs their first ever version that I created (always on the right).
I went into designing my characters with a simple intent - if I felt they fit the role and the personality I had in mind for them while I also found them attractive (duh, right?), then I was on the right path. With each main girl, both with appearance and personality/behavior, I intend to elicit specific emotions from the readers. I spent crazy amounts of time fine-tuning them and therefore staring at them, and I never thought I'd say this but I'm actually mostly happy with how the main girls turned out... there are some exceptions, like hairs not being perfect and-... you know what, I said mostly for a reason.
As I started learning more and more about character designs - especially in the last few months - I always went back and tuned all the girls while ensuring that they stayed true to the design that I unveiled them with.
Note: all the older versions have messed up eyes because they used older shaders; I didn't want to change them as it would make their eyes look basically the same as today, and actually every single one of them had vastly different looking eyes back in the day.
Ayame
Ayame was the 6th out of the 7 main girls to be created. She had a preliminary design back in August 2025 which I didn't touch for months, both for being unsure about how to make her look good, but also because I was doing other stuff too. Her character almost didn't make it in, as originally Ella was supposed to be the "goth girl" in Aether. However, after I decided against that, Ayame got the go ahead. The single most frustrating and challenging aspect of her design was her tattoos. Partially because I had no clue how to even approach things, as I didn't want to use an existing overlay without modifying it, and also because I had to work in photoshop (I have an unhealthy love-hate relationship with that software).
Ella
Ella was originally not supposed to exist, I intended Maria to have only two daughters and therefore she was made as 5th out of the 7 main girls (although I had an attempt at a girl whose concept got scrapped and I had a fairly-close-to-final version of a main girl who also got cut).
She, as mentioned before, was originally meant to be a rather textbook archetype character. I original wrote her to be standoffish, difficult to get along with while she was a full-on rebel. While her rebellious nature somewhat stuck with her with a twist, I tuned her behavior a lot as well (her loyalty and even obsession with her sisters and her family as a whole). While she is very much capable of being standoffish with people, thanks to her strong will and ability to stay true to what she believes in, my original idea of her being the tsundere, whom Hector would need to conquer, is gone (I suppose that role somewhat shifted towards Reina).
Quick note: some people rightly pointed it out that her head always seemed large (which is really just massively exacerbated by her hairstyle, which I might change), so I very recently fixed this and finally made her head smaller - the version on the left is the current one.
Leila
And here comes the very first of the main girls whom I created. Her base design was nailed down at the very start, but I do believe that all the changes are also fairly easy to see. Leila (along with Sofia) were the two designs I originally created back in 2024 when I was working on something that eventually turned into Aether through some massive changes. Leila was my 2nd (or 3rd) design ever in HS2, perhaps it's that nostalgia or something else that influenced me to not rework her completely, even after I started noticing so many problems and imperfections about her design. Instead I kept iterating, going back and updating whenever I learned something new about character designs, fine-tuning her into how she looks today.
I admit, there are a couple of things that I would want to change, but for now I decided to keep them, acting as imperfections. I'll see how I feel about them long-term, and also how you guys will feel (although, based on Discord roles, she's #1 most popular main girl).
Maria
Maria was the 3rd of the 7 main girls, and quite honestly, I didn't remember that she was so close to her current design, at least looking at this render. I've made lots of smaller changes to her face and her body too, but it seems like at first glance they're difficult to spot. Maria's role in the story is a very peculiar one, some people have already pointed it out correctly in the Discord server, so writing her is a challenge. I have a plan in mind for her, and truthfully, the reason why she was included as a main girl in the first place was for the mature women lovers.
There's even a chance that she'll go through a bit of a change throughout the story, where she'd thin down a little as she's a tiny bit more on the chubbier side (in a way). This is undecided though, I'll eagerly listen to feedback regarding this and see what's the consensus.
Reina
Reina is the last of the main girls who got created and I actually rushed her design by the end. I couldn't really decide who I wanted to make her into, so she had 3 different iterations where she was vastly different characters - busty and tall, very lean model-like, super fit and athletic. Her initial designs were made just after Ayame, however she went through a complete redesign later.
In February 2026 I went back to the drawing board and redesigned her from scratch. I ended up having to rush finishing her design right before the official character introductions and I was super uncertain about how she turned out. I genuinely believed she was my weakest design.
After the minor changes since then and fine-tuning her alongside all other girls I eventually managed to nail her direction down (I believe). On top of that, she's the 2nd most popular main girl according to our Discord server stats, so while she was giving me anxiety due to being rushed and I feared nobody would like her, perhaps it's really true when people say that later designs are always stronger due to having more experience.
Sofia
And lastly the girl who changed the most form her inception - yep, Sofia's very different. Her direction was something that I couldn't capture for a really long time. She went through 2 major reworks to arrive roughly at the place where she is today (and even after that she probably received the most amount of smaller adjustments). Sofia, being from the original story that I was creating back in 2024, had a different role in the story and her personality wasn't nearly as refined as today.
I'm truly glad that I took a step back in 2024 and reevaluated things and decided to shift back to only writing as I was still figuring out what kind of story I was trying to tell. This way I also ended up going back to character creation and approached it with an eager mind to yet again learn more and improve.
Back then I got overexcited about rendering and jumped straight in. I already had 100 and something renders done, all of which obviously got scrapped... gods they look bad. Perhaps in the future I'll show a couple of them.
Even since I've shown off the girls back in April (or May?), I've been making small changes to them, constantly improving them as I get better at character designs myself. Ideally, I don't want my earlier designs (especially main girls) to play catch-up with newly designed side girls for instance.
So that was yap festival #10. I kinda ran out of juice by end.
Honestly, looking at all the girls, perhaps this last section wasn't as interesting as I initially thought. I feel it's only Reina and Sofia who changed considerably. It is what it is, thank you for reading if you were interested!
Thank you to every single of one of you for your continuous support, your interest, engaging with anything related to Aether, and most importantly, thank you for believing in me and this fictional universe I'm creating.
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Dev Log #9 | Skipping this Dev Log
Lost the entire post I originally wrote, disappearing into thin air. That was cool. Made me write a shorter version this way.
It's not like there's much to report unfortunately, and I'm sorry for that. It sucks, but things have not been easy.
I've been dealing with lots of technical issues, so much so that I thought I couldn't properly create scenes on my custom maps (like the Linwood house I talked about last Dev Log), but thankfully yesterday and today I got the new workflow down on how to do things moving forward.
Whenever I got pissed at the studio too much as I couldn't figure out how to salvage my situation I went and created background NPCs.
I've been dealing with some personal problems too, as we all do, that just make things more difficult than they should be. Just gotta deal with it.
Anyways, thanks to everyone for reading, supporting and just being interested in my work.
I hope you all are doing great, take care of yourselves!
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Dev Log #8
Hello everyone!
Here is the Dev Log that I thought wouldn't happen because of my new job and I was rather accurate with my prediction in thinking that I couldn't show you enough progress to warrant writing a post. However, I've changed my mind in how I want to approach these posts and instead of feeling pressure and anxiety from getting to the point and showing only numbers like X amount of renders done, I'd instead talk a bit more about what's happening and try not worrying so much about people not caring and only wanting actual numbers. Of course, when there are numbers to report on, you will still find them in the Dev Logs.
So, what's been happening?
With the first couple of scenes done, I had to go back to a map which I've been working on since the start of this year - the Linwood house, which is something that you've seen glimpses of already. It's a fully custom-made map by me and by now I've put in well over month's work into it and it's still not finished. Leila's room was the first section I created, which you could see in an older render here (at least part of it):
Then I started Sofia's room, however I realized I'd need the complete layout of the house before I could get the tiny details down, which meant I went downstairs and started finalizing the entire floor plan of the house and creating it.
After most of the downstairs area was finished (which was a huge chunk of the time invested), I could use it for some renders with Maria, here's one of them:
(Some of the renders below were also taken on this map)
After the initial ~5 weeks of work on it back in January/February, I got extremely tired of the architectural and interior design expertise that it required and I moved onto working on other stuff, but I always knew I'd obviously have to go back to it. Since then, I've worked on it in really small stints here-and-there, but my focus obviously shifted.
However, the moment finally arrived because the next 6 scenes take place inside the Linwood house, which meant I had to finalize everything which can be seen in these scenes. Ideally, I'd really want to avoid showing something now which ends up getting changed next chapter or the one after, causing you to think: "didn't that look different in the past?"
If you're wondering why I've been building a fully custom house, which is totally valid to question because I'm insane, then let me share my thought-process:
I wanted this place to feel truly unique to Aether; there are many maps that AVN devs use in HS2, but at the end of the day, you will see maps used across different titles, and with my creative goals, I wanted to avoid someone going: "oh, this is the same house from xyz"
I recognize that I can't do this all the time with all environments because of the sheer amount of time it can take. Especially now, as things are different compared to when I quietly worked on Aether and nobody knew about it yet. There are future moments and scenes that demand specific assets that will require extra time, but I believe the effort put into them will pay off. There are other AVNs that create their own environments and in my opinion, as not just a dev but an AVN-enjoyer, those projects always stand out to me and I remember them in particular depth and detail.
Overall, I've made amazing progress on the Linwood house. Something that I dreaded and just couldn't be bothered to work on in the last few months became a MUST and I finally finished it - it was the garden. I don't know why, but I couldn't figure out what to do with it. I think cutting the garden to half its original size had eased some of my worries and helped me understand that it doesn't need to be perfect, just cozy enough to feel like home. Some of this may seem silly to you, but you'd be surprised how tough it can be to create something from nothing with no direction or knowledge on what is and isn't acceptable from a design standpoint. If I create something and it's clearly designed by an amateur, that's not very immersive then is it? (I admit the garden might still be amateur but time is a lot more of the essence now than before lol)
There are a bunch of additional things that I fixed/improved. Most of the work on this whole map have been the design and actual architecture - putting walls, windows, doors etc. all together, perfectly aligned to make an actual full house out of nothing. For the first task - well I'm not an architect, nor an interior designer. And for the second one, to say the least HS2 is not designed for something like this... at all. But, the amazing modding community of this game have created a good amount of assets that one can use to do something outrageous like this (I don't think many people do this... I don't recommend it, it's masochistic). Back in February I even had the idea to make the entire neighborhood myself... yeah, thank the gods I abandoned that stupid idea very quickly.
I've also been making some renders which will be framed photos appearing around the Linwood house (the Ella graduation render from Dev Log #7 was the first one for this purpose). Perhaps you've already seen some of these on our Discord but here is a render dump of them:
As a side-note, beyond all the designing and some rendering, I've done a bit more lore work and some brainstorming for other chapters and events.
I originally intended to talk a little more about my new job in this post, simply because it's impacting progress just as much (or perhaps even more) than I thought, but I had decided against it because I don't want to bitch about my problems. In short, things are not easy... or good... like at all, for many reasons. While it puts food on the table, I can see that it will cause issues later-on, stuff that I'd rather not get into, but in this labor market it's almost impossible to land a job, so switching isn't really an option either. I'll take things one day at a time and keep pouring every minute that I have outside of my day-job into working on Aether, it's pretty much the only thing that makes me happy after all. (and I ended up bitching, my bad I guess)
I also wanted to mention that the resurfaced health issue I mentioned before is seemingly going away again. Thankfully, I could address the problem just like I did before and from what I can see, things are stabilizing, which will definitely help me out in enduring these difficult weekdays.
That's it for today, whether you've read all that or not, I appreciate you all for being here. Your support and your interest in Aether means a lot to me, especially when life is very stressful.
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Dev Log #7 | More personal stuff yapping
Sup!
Hope you all are doing great on this fine day and ready to dive into a potentially lengthy dev log. First the progress, then I will talk about some personal stuff about my new job and how things are going.
We're up to 259 renders total for the Prologue so far. Based on how many renders I have already for the amount of words covered, I'm expecting a decent render count for the Prologue... probably 1500+. But I'll see how different scenes will have different requirements.
I designed and coded a large chunk of the UI and menus of the game. From a coding perspective, all the foundational logic is done and it all works as intended. From a design standpoint, I still need to finish the gallery, the main girls' character screen and the Book of Lore (my codex functionality).
I spent a long time on the menus and I have a bunch of functionality that I hope people will appreciate. If there are any that you think is still really important to have, feel free to let me know through whatever channels you'd like. I'll list some of the main things which I've already implemented:
Already mentioned, but: Gallery, main girls' screen, Book of Lore (codex)
Optional save-naming
Tooltips toggle (new words/concepts will have a brief explanation upon hovering over them in the text box with your cursor, this can be toggled off if you wish)
Separate music, SFX, voice and UI audio channels. Also, audio during lewd scenes received separate audio channels - SFX and voice are included here. Separate audio channels allow you to change the volume for each of these categories however you want.
Dialogue settings tab with a preview window of a sample dialogue screen and settings for customizable text size, text outline, text box opacity, text box width and height.
Want a random, super boring screenshot of a menu? Here: ═══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════
Update on my new job and how development will be affected
This week I started at my new job. It's been about a month since I mentioned it, and yes, it took this long because HR was... doing HR things... I guess? Anyways, to give people a bit more information while keeping some things private: I was hired into this company via being recommended by someone who works there, and based on my knowledge and profession, they knew they wanted to hire me, but they didn't have any openings in my area of expertise. Because of this, they looked at alternatives within the company. I had talks with one of the department leads who's overseeing way more stuff than what their official responsibilities are, and for some reason he started seeing a lot of potential in having me join the team.
Sound crazy so far? Yeah, I know... it's an odd bunch and there's not as much heavy corporate pressure from above in a sense.
There are multiple reasons why this is a particularly tough challenge for me, but I obviously can't mention internal affairs of what is happening inside the company, but I'll say that things are looking real rough - I was basically brought in, into a position where I'm supposed to put out the fires. Additionally, the company operates in a unique, sort of niche industry which requires an immense amount of technical knowledge and expertise within this field; something that I don't have because I know fuck-all about this industry. So, that means a crapton of studying something that I already tried studying before in school for a year and I actively disliked it, so much so that I dropped it after a year.
So, how does all this affect development?
My goal is to get all of my work done on Aether (or at least most) before I head to my job in the morning (near 2 hour commute, yay). So far it actually worked, even though I was pretty sleep deprived in all cases. I believe my plan is working and I can only improve the situation from here. This means that while I do see some slowing down, especially now in the beginning as I'm starting out and my brain is actual poached eggs after I finish work (could keep happening even after I get used to stuff), I believe I can still work at a decent pace.
What else may change?
I've been pretty active on Discord since I started, my previous job was really comfortable so it was something I could allow myself, and I really enjoy talking to people about Aether itself, development or AVNs in general. Unfortunately, my activity in Discord will have to drop as less time means I'll prioritize more on development itself. That doesn't mean you can't reach out to me, talk to me, DM me etc. Tag me in our server, DM all you want, I just may not see your message that quickly sometimes, but I'll still respond!
I also thought about moving dev logs over to a monthly schedule, just to ease some of the stress or expectation a report like this creates, but I haven't made an executive decision yet. I'll see how things are in 2 weeks and how much progress I achieved and then decide how to go about it.
Thanks a lot for reading! Work's not stopping at all, in fact with my new job and salary I'll be able to buy an SSD so I can speed up work inside studio - that will be a game-changer for me.
Now go drink some water after reading this yap session!
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Dev Log #6
Hello-hello, fire up your ACs, whip out the fans or ice because summer is really heating up, hope y'all are doing well in the heat and you're staying hydrated!
Before we jump into the dev log - the new main art for Aether has been completed, brought to you by our mysterious seventh love interest! You will also see this on Aether's itch.io page, which has finally gone live! I'd be very grateful if you guys could check out the page and tell me what you think!
The main editing phase for the Prologue's script is done. At this point the only changes will be made during rendering
Rendering has officially started! We are up to 168 renders currently - although these are raw renders for now, they will go through some post-processing and some fixes (like fixing texture bugs/artifacts, neckseams haunt my nightmares at this point). 1 simple animation has been done too, although I might need to tune it a bit
I'm still doing stuff in the background that is basically work for all of Aether and not just specifically for the Prologue, such as lore, technical stuff and learning various software and skills. Investment for the long-run we can call it
I've also done some changes to all the main girls, including: fully customized boob and butt shapes, customized nipples, manually placed moles all over their bodies. These small details are aiming to create uniqueness in each girl across the cast, but also compared to other characters made in the same engine
That's pretty much all that's worth mentioning. I've been having some rough times as one of my past health issues has resurfaced which caused my productivity to drop somewhat. I've also been getting a bit antsy and stressed over what the future will bring with my new job soon. But, I'm addressing both of them so I can get back on track.
Oh and if you didn't see it on itch or discord - holy-moly is that lewd hand-holding I see?!
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