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.

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).

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.

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.

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 a lot, 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

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