Hey, folks! Hope your week's off to a good start. Sorry to get this up late again. @_@ I've been a day behind for like three weeks, and unfortunately it won't be stopping anytime soon. I've got some hectic, time-sensitive stuff in my personal life that's eating away at my days, I've been doing some annoying annual re-certification stuff at my day job, and of course I'm cranking away on renders as fast as I possibly can. I've put an extra wick in my candle, so I can burn it at more than both ends.

But, things are moving pretty well. I'm in the process of getting a test build ready for my $15+ supporters, which'll likely hit at the end of the month. It'll likely be missing the last scene, since I'm not finished with it yet. But, there'll be a good bit of content. And I mayyyy have time to squeak in a few of the less lengthy, optional endings.

Attached to this post you'll find some images for a scene I had a lot of fun with, because I got to go a little big and crazy, in an environment that doesn't usually see a lot of action -- our hero's condo. As you can see, there's a bunch of extra figures in one of the images, and poor Risa's looking more than a little flustered. I'll leave you to speculate about what's going on, but I'll take a minute to get into the nitty gritty of how I put the scene together.

For those that don't know, Daz figures can be reeeeally resource-intensive. That typically limits you to a few figures per scene, if you want the renders to process in a timely fashion. Given that I'm trying to do hundreds (and over time, thousands) of renders, I can't let renders cook for hours. If a render takes more than twenty minutes, I start getting pretty annoyed. So, for a scene like this, where I want a lot of people in it, there's a few options. I could use the Scene Optimizer, which reduces the texture map of objects within the scene. Pretty useful, but it has its limits, if I don't want the characters' skin reduced to a blobby mess.

So, I tend to prefer using billboards, two-dimensional images that you can insert into a scene. Now, you can buy some fancy ones that allow you to rotate the image on the X and Y axis, and they're pretty neat. But, those sets are expensive, and you're limited to what that asset creator has made available. So, I like to use Billboard Builder and make my own. This can be useful for all kinds of stuff, from background characters to skylines. So, I set about making my background cast of party girls.

I basically just set up a light similar to what I want in the scene, and render figures against an empty, transparent background. Boom, done. But.. This takes time. And as I've already discussed, I don't like wasting a lot of time. So, I decided to try something. I tossed a couple of these images to Perplexity, told it to match the style, and generate a bunch of dancing bikini girls on a plain background. Here are some of the figures it gave me.

In the end, a process that would've taken me a decent amount of time (posing bodies, props, facial expressions, and hair, rendering, applying costumes and hair, tattoos, etc.) took me under ten minutes. I removed the backgrounds from the images with this handy tool, put them into the Billboard Builder, and I quickly had a full scene of girls partying.

Now, would I want to use this for something important? No. I'd rather be able to fully control a character's expression, pose, etc. But for background characters, which I knew I'd be blurring with a little depth of field trickery to hide any funky AI features? Well, it's a pretty solid return on the time investment.

That's it for me, today! I'm currently pushing myself to get the alpha build for the next chapter done by the 8th. That feels doable. But, as always I'll keep you updated on my progress. Until next time, take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!

Hey, friends! Hope you’re all having a nice day. Fall’s in the air, and your basic bitch buddy Neon is sipping pumpkin spice lattes and enjoying the changing of the leaves.

Work on the next chapter continues, and I’m finally at the last scene in the new chapter — Gabby’s big, spicy scene. It'll be a pretty big scene, with my usual options for positions and "finishing moves." The chapter’s also gonna be pretty big, in terms of raw image count. I just hope it feels pretty big in terms of playtime. It’s always really hard to judge it accurately, when I’m in the thick of it. This one definitely moves some plot points forward, which were gestating for most of Season 1. So, that may help me beat the, "Nothing ever happens!" accusations.

I’m arriving at the point of this dev cycle where this whole dev log thing gets a little more difficult, though. I've shown off most of the scenes I've wanted to show off, and now most of what's left is spoiler-y stuff I'd rather have surprise people. So uh, enjoy that pic of someone’s dirty sneakers, and Guy’s loafers. But, you do get some Viola side-booty to make up for it. That’s fair, right?

I’m still working on getting the rest of Season 1 integrated. This one's slightly more involved, in terms of fixing stuff in the script, than previous ones. In addition to the normal thing of fixing broken variables, and cleaning up little continuity errors, I'm working on a couple little tweaks that involve maximizing the amount of content all players get to see.

Previously, in (the newly renumbered) Chapter 11, you had the option to take Risa to a hotel, or to The Lawful Waffle. The hotel option could be important for shaping your relationship with Risa, but the Lawful Waffle scene was important for developing stuff with Pepper's plotline. So, a player had to miss out on one or the other. Now, even if you go to the hotel in Chapter 11, you'll circle back to the Lawful Waffle in (the newly renumbered) Chapter 12, which closes out Season 1. You'll just get less content in said scene.

And previously in Chapter 12, you had a few options, which were restricted by how much time/energy you have that day: taking Mason shopping, visiting Brittani at Chest Cheetahs, visiting Nicki at a charity event, or going to the park to meet Dash, which allowed you to get a short ero scene. Now, meeting Dash is mandatory, but you can only get her ero scene if you've retained enough time/energy that day. 

So, everyone gets a little more content, but the decisions you make still shape those events. I think it's a good idea, buuuuut it also requires me to make sure I'm not breaking anything while I do it. So, I've gotta take a little more time with it.

That's all for today! As always, take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!

Hey, friends! Hope all's well with you and yours this week!

At present, the next chapter stands at over 1100 renders. I've wrapped up Alex's scene that I was working on, and now I'm doing some small scenes with Cassie. After that, it's onto the Gabby material that will comprise the end of the chapter.

Of course, I still need to get the last two chapters of Season One in order, so that remains in my periphery. I've been working on the code with my laptop, while my main PC runs renders. Maximum efficiency or burning the candle at both ends? You decide!

Unfortunately, there's just not a lot of interesting stuff to talk about right now. I've just gotta do what I've been doing, and keep chugging on the rendering front. If I can get these Cassie scenes and the Season 1 stuff done by the end of the week, that'll put me in a good position to burn through the Gabby renders over the rest of the month. If I finish this week's work ahead of time? Even better!

So, that's that! If you're subscribed at any level, be sure to check out yesterday's (well, today's because I had some technical difficulties last night..) Wanton Weekends, for a side of Carolina that you haven't seen before.

As always, take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!

Hey, folks! Hope your week's off to a good start. Sorry to get this up a day late, but the day job kicked my butt yesterday, and I didn't have the energy to write this up.

In recent days I put out a new Season 1 build for all supporter tiers, which integrated another three chapters into the newest version. Two more to go, and that'll be it for Season 1. In terms of content, this one is/was pretty modest. It adds a very small branch for Ashe from her ero scene, which added a negligible number of renders. The main purpose of the build was to update variables and continuity/logic, tweaking some of Ashe's dialogue to reflect changes new possibilities that were added with the previous Season 1 build.

It also added extras like A Slave to Desire and Blue Valentine to the base game, allowing you to access them from the main menu. In the next build, I'll have some more goodies in there, like the original version of Chapter 1, and the super-short 'anti-Nicki' joke patch. And this is all a precursor to eventually having a working gallery system built into the game. I'm also working on getting the prose short stories from the blog added in, along with character profiles, etc. Right now you can expect the implementation of these additions to be a little ugly, but I intend to pretty them up a bit over time.

I'll be unlocking the current build of Season 1 tomorrow, and updating the blog's pinned post to remove some links that are no longer necessary.

Now, as for the debut chapter for Season 2, I'm still working on that. I'm about halfway through Alex's scene, which means I need to finish that, a small scene with Cassie, and then the content with Gabby which ends the chapter. After that, I'll be done. There's still some work ahead, but the end creeps ever closer into sight.

This whole dual channel development thing, working on new material while fixing up old material, put a real damper on some of my plans for the year. I have timelapse videos for scene creations that I've been meaning to record voice-overs for, I've got a spicy fantasy novel that I want to release in serialized format that needs some edits, I've got mini-game scripts similar to Blue Valentine sitting around waiting to be rendered, and on and on. But, this whole year has been spent keeping a bunch of plates in the air, leaving me without the time and energy to focus on other, fun stuff. That'll all be coming to an end soon, and I'm looking forward to having some free time available again.

Until then, thanks for bearing with me during this chaotic time. As always, take care of yourselves -- and thank you for your support!

Hey, folks! I'm neck-deep in getting new builds ready, today. So I'm just going to share a few images from the next chapter, and get back to work.

As always, take care of yourselves and thank you for your support!

Hey, folks! Hope you're all doing well this week!

I'm a little under the weather, so I'll keep it short and sweet, today. I'm on track to get the rest of Season One out by the end of the month. For folks who have played the Legacy Version, there's not going to be a whole lot of new stuff. Mostly some new ero positions for Risa's scenes, and a bit of reorganization for some scenes. For people who have only come to the game recently, you'll have a lot more stuff to check out.

The new chapter is also entering the home stretch. I've got two main scenes to wrap up, one of which is going to be a little lengthy. But, I'm doing everything I can to get it out the door as soon as possible.

Finally, as part of my effort to do weekly Wanton Weekends updates for the month of September, I did a photoset revolving around.. tentacles! You can see a mostly-SFW version of one image attached. These little photosets are always a ton of fun, giving me the opportunity to dip into weirder stuff I can't really touch in the actual game, due to the (mostly) grounded nature of the story. I might even do another tentacle set next week, just because I had so much fun with this one! :D

Alright, I'll end it there for today. As always, take care of yourselves and thank you for your support!