Is that smoke supposed to be coming from the GPU?

Hello everyone, and welcome to the weekly public update.  We are almost at the end of May and approaching the first anniversary of the game's initial offering.  I like using these posts to show how much the game has evolved over that time, so today we'll look at some direct comparisons of new renders with old pictures.

I've been hitting the rendering work hard recently, so I do have some new stuff to show you this week.  Above, we see Poppy and her underlings, beautifully remastered in the fight scene from Down with the Bad Girls.  Let's have a look at the original to see how far she's come:

As always, there are no changes to the character models.  This improvement was all achieved with lighting.  I took a bit of time over re-lighting this scene as it's meant to take place at dusk, and I don't think the old versions of the images really properly conveyed that.  The bad girls hazing ritual scene will get the same treatment when I get to it.

Back in the sunshine, the beautiful, but strict Miss Cuchucha has also benefitted from relighting.  It's a bit harder to see the improvement in brightly-lit scenes, but the contrast of colours makes the characters jump out of the screen more and feel less flat.  Your brain notices it even if your eye struggles.

The improvement is pretty easy to see in the cricket scene though, as it received vastly improved grass textures as well as relighting.  The modders are doing an amazing job with HS2, and there are so many more options for stuff like this open to devs now than there were in 2020 when I began work on Missy.

Let's round off with the rather sweet scene with Abbie at the end of the first day.  The hair sniffing is still one of my favourite little mini-gags in the game.  It's been remastered here, to a) look more like she's actually got it under her nose and b) make her look a little more panicked as she tries to think of a reply.

This scene was made at a time when I actually intended Abbie's relationship arc to be longer and play Missy's 'unrequited' affection for laughs a little more before we eventually discover that Abbie does feel the same way, however, as development progressed, it became clear that Abbie was best placed to serve as the 'tutorial' relationship quest.  As the best friend since childhood, she'd naturally be the one Missy was closest to from the start.  

I was concerned that by leaving it longer, she would risk being sidelined as a major character.  I've had this problem with Becky, who was supposed to be the next relationship quest, and have much more content by now, but hasn't had as big a role in the game so far as I'd intended, partly because she keeps doing frustratingly poorly in polls.  And the reason for that is because no one really knows her very well, despite the character model being (in my humble opinion) one of my most beautiful.

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this week's public offering.  As always, I've had to put the more tame stuff here, but there'll be some of the good stuff on Deviantart.  If you want to see it all though, you'll need to become a supporter!

I'll be back next week.  Until then!

Trinian