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Time has really been flying for me. I hope everyone is doing well.
Checking my last update post, I was surprised at how far back the things I talked about are—I guess I found myself remembering what I’ve shared on Discord, and thought I’d posted blogs about it that I didn’t. Whoops!
I’ll take that as a sign that I should remind people that my Discord channel still exists. It’s mostly quiet, but I post more of my unorganized thoughts on there (not to mention I check daily for activity, if anyone has comments or questions). Here’s the link if you’re not already there.
Well, okay, I’ve just been playing with Suno, which allows you to prompt an AI to generate music for you. I’m hearing impaired, so I can’t vouch for any of the audio quality, but I’ve been mostly impressed that it’s been possible to do at all.
I’ve been working on figuring out more of the “ins and outs” of prompting music, but my hope is that it might become a useful tool for creating some background tracks for games. Could make for a nice change of pace, for those who have heard enough Kevin MacLeod in their visual novels.
Cartoon Style
Something I shared on Discord, but probably not here: I was looking into other art styles AI might be able to produce reliably, and tried to see if I could get a more simplistic look with line art that might make it easier for me to do edits (to fix things like hands, that AI tends to massacre).
Most of these were basic character turnarounds with different prompts and settings, all using the same Open Pose ControlNet:
Something I really haven’t been able to control, however, is the shading style. It seems to just turn out differently based on the seed. Case in point, these two are the same prompt, with different seeds. One has very sharp-edged cel-style shading, and the other has more of an airbrushed look:
Either style would be relatively easy to make edits and changes to, though…but it would be nice if I could reliably get the kind of results I want on-demand, though.
To have the most control over the image content, my plan would be to use this in combination with 3D models. It’ll mean a lot of back and forth between tweaking the models, and the AI prompts, until I get combos that are a good fit for each other.
I did find that I need more than just a basic Image-to-Image pass, as things break down the more the AI is emphasized over the 3D model:
I think the samples above at different denoising levels illustrates what happens if the AI has too much control. But, in the in-between stages, it shows me what it wants to generate as far as eye size, position of facial features, and the like—I figure I can try to adjust the 3D model to be a better fit.
Trying similar attempts with ControlNet for the pose and basic elements of the image seems to help keep the AI version from getting too crazy.
AI Sex Change
This one came as a request to help create female versions of male characters, but it helped me figure out some new techniques.
I’ve never completely understood the “Reference” ControlNet model (still don’t), but I did discover that I could isolate the portion of the image I wanted to use as a reference, and the AI seems to understand what I’m going for.
In this case, I wanted to try to keep the facial features and some of the hair, so I removed the rest.
This seemed to get reasonable female versions of the characters (though they’ll likely require the same art filter the rest of the game’s assets use in order to blend in better.)
AIDetails
Just to share some of my pain: I’ve tried a little bit to see if I can figure out how to use ADetailer for fixing image issues, such as hands. So far, I haven’t had too much luck.
Sadly, finding a good way to address garbled parts of an image is probably one of the biggest hurdles when it comes to actually being able to do anything productive with AI art.
Paper-Doll Character
I’m still working off-and-on trying to see if I can make a paper-doll-style character (intended for Clean Slate), and it’s been a bit of a challenge to generate all of the necessary parts while making them look like they flow properly together.
Typically, I’ll automate this process by having Stable Diffusion work its way through dozens of different prompts while I’m working my day job. It’ll take some hours, after which, I’ll review what it’s made, figure out what changes to try with the prompts, and ready it for the next day’s run.
It’s a bit of a disjointed process, and I’ll often forget what I was doing with it between renders.
Patreon TOS Changes
If you’re not aware, Patreon changes their TOS on a regular basis, each time adding additional restrictions to “Adult” creators. This latest one is going to make a lot of content unacceptable on the platform, and has made me a bit uncertain about whether or not anything I make in future will be allowed.
At some point, I suppose I’ll need to make the decision of whether I want to make Patreon/bank/credit-card-safe erotic content, or if I’ll have to switch entirely to SubscribeStar. Something to think about.
Still to Come
I really want to do something with video/animation at some point. I still haven’t taken the plunge and started experimenting, but I’m curious what can be done with AI. I’ve already seen some stuff done using Stable Diffusion and keyframes, and, of course, EbSynth is an option to use in combination.
I’ve also considered pixel art. I think the low resolution could be more forgiving.
One way or another, I’d just like to have more for people to look at than just still images.
Backer Content
I didn’t want to paywall the album (though I think it would be okay with Suno’s TOS), so I already blew the biggest thing I had, but in my backer post, I’ll talk a bit more about each of the songs.
I’ll also have some more samples of some of the other items I talked about above.
Hi, all! Yes, I’m still alive, and still grateful for those of you who are still supporting me in my endeavors, as meandering as they may be (hyper-distracted rabbity-thing and all that…)
A part of me doesn’t want to check to confirm (don’t think I want to realize the truth), but I want to say I’m about a year into this hiatus from Interns. It’s really invigorated a lot of my creative impulses, and staved off complete creative burnout—something I’ve experienced before, and desperately wanted to avoid.
Lately, I’ve been feeling the itch to start tackling a project of my own to some degree, but I’m a bit conflicted over what that should be, or where to start; a part of me is wary of committing to anything that will give me that “trapped” feeling, so I want to take things a bit slow as I do that.
I’ll save my thoughts on that for a bit lower in the post.
For now, I’ll talk a bit about what I’ve been up to, and what I’m still planning on working more with.
AI Stuff I’m still very much working my way down the AI rabbit hole (ha!). I’m well aware that a lot of people have really strong feelings in regard to AI stuff, but, I see it as an exciting new series of tools that may (hopefully) enable some less-talented and motivated people, such as myself, to be able to do projects that would ordinarily be beyond our abilities.
It can definitely be abused—and I’ve been seeing plenty of examples where it’s been employed to throw out some quick artwork with little time being invested to correct blatant errors when it’s obvious that the piece isn’t intended to be a placeholder of WIP image.
There’s also a tendency for everything to look the same, as people tend to find one style that looks good, and everyone else copies it.
Personally, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find a way to combine AI with HS in a way that will let me create something a bit better than with HS alone.
AI “Filtered” 3D Models One of the big issues with using limited 3D software is that I’m restricted to whatever elements others have created or imported models for. There have been more than a few times when I’ve resorted to using my image-editing skills and Photoshop filters to attempt to create things that I couldn’t get in 3D. There have also been some cases where the HS model anatomy is so abysmal in some poses, that I’ve either needed to just let it go, or spend hours trying to correct things as best I can.
I’ll be sharing some quick samples of some recent experiments with using AI like an image filter, to attempt to get a little more life (and better anatomy) out of the somewhat lifeless HS models.
Above, you can see the quick attempt with ‘May in the arcade,’ and there’s also this equally-as-quick take on Chastity:
With Image-to-Image generations, you can specify how much power the AI is given to change the initial image (with a range of 0.0 to 1.0). Too little, and you just get the same image. Too much, and it completely ignores the original.
Things can quickly get out of control…as evidenced here:
There are tools to help with this, however, like ControlNet, which has a number of different ways to influence the AI generation.
In the case of the May image, here are a few of the ControlNet models that I played with while trying out the “filter”:
And here’s a plot of images created with the AI denoising strength going from 03. to 0.7:
Image editing is still helpful, of course, as I can mix and match parts of different generations when trying to build a final image. Obviously, more work is required if I want to make sure I actually get things like reasonable hands and such…as AI is notoriously bad with those.
LoRA Training So, over the last few months, I’ve put more effort into AI training, with more of a focus on LoRA training, as I’ve been getting a bit better at it. With AI training, I should *hopefully* be able to get the AI to understand concepts like what a character should look like, or define an art style that will help my creations stand out a bit.
I’ve been working off-and-on at creating a style LoRA for X-Change Life, attempting to match that game’s mix of AI filters, image edits, and Midjourney creations. While my latest attempt at one manages to match the style more closely than any before it, I really feel it acts a bit like a sledgehammer—turning *ANY* image into something similar to what exists in the game…to the extent where it ignores much of the original specifications of the prompt. The image below shows it being used at increasing strengths, with the first image being what the AI was asked to generate, and the last being the LoRA at 100% potency.
Ideally, what I’d want is the first image, except with the style of the last, but I’m clearly getting more than just the image style.
I want to save at least a little something for the backer post, so I’ll include some more samples of images made with this style LoRA there, along with some NSFW samples from a different art style LoRA I’ve been working on (that failed miserably).
Modding
One of my other big focuses since last time has been modding for XCL. I was *hoping* to expand the bar-drink-spike mod I was working on with a little bit of story and gameplay mechanics, but it ended up getting completely out of control and turning into a bigger project than I had originally anticipated.
I’m still hoping to get it into a playable state and pushed out the door for others to enjoy, but I keep finding errors and aspects that need to be fleshed out. So far, though, working on it has been the closest I’ve come to doing actual game development in a while—both the good and bad aspects of it (as I’ve come to resent the mod a few times while working on it).
Still, getting back to my roots with game modding has really reinforced the point that I probably need to work on games that I can play and enjoy myself, and I’ve seen I really like seeing the things I’ve created pop up during gameplay. So, this is clearly something I need to keep in mind when deciding what I want to do next.
Moving into 2024
So, that’s some of what I’ve been playing with—and, of course, I’ll share some of my additional AI generations in the backer post, though it’s not as much as previous. Here’s what I’m planning on doing, going into the new year:
My AI To-Do List
Art
There’s still more I’d like to spend time looking into with regards to Stable Diffusion. As it is, I’m behind the curve, as I’m still using Version 1.5, while I’ve seen other people getting much better anatomy out of SDXL.
There are a few additional tools I’d like to spend some time exploring, such as ADetailer, which can identify elements of images (faces, breasts, genitals) and make corrections automatically.
I also remember coming across a plugin that allowed for drawing a segmentation map—dividing up the image into different areas that could take different prompts. This means that I could describe elements of the image in sections that would keep prompt elements from “polluting” different parts of the image. Likely handy for describing two different characters in the same scene, or background elements.
I’ve been seeing a lot of people having great luck with using face-swapping AI to help keep characters on-model, too. Seems like it could be useful to have a master character document that could be used to help fix images that are veering too far from what they’re supposed to look like (there’s also a “Reference” ControlNet model, too).
Writing & Code
There’s the LLM/GPT side of AI that I still want to work with, as well. During my hiatus from Interns, I’ve had plenty of story ideas, but what I’ve been struggling with is actually sitting down and writing anything; I’m still not sure what is causing this particular block for me, or the best way to get past it.
I’ve had plenty of suggestions on how to use GPT as a writing aide, and I’ve seen some potential from some experiments (such as using my story samples to help create style guides for the AI to work with, whether novel-style or how I’d write a more traditional ADV-type visual novel).
I’m a bit curious to try something like a connect-the-dots approach, where I’ll write story content, put in some notes whenever I start drawing blanks or getting fatigued, and have the AI try filling in the in-between sections of the story that are necessary, but not as exciting to write.
I’d also like to go back and give Auto-GPT another try, now that I have a second system that I could run it on. I’m still curious to see how well it would work as a coding assistant, if I was able to give it a design document for it to work from, with the self-running aspect giving it the power to do multiple passes and expand on its own work.
U666 Game Project
As I said at the start, there’s a part of me that’s itching to create something all my own again, but, admittedly, I’m torn. I have plenty of ideas, but deciding on what would be best in the long run is challenging.
Interns - Well, let’s start with the obvious one. Picking up Interns again is my first option, and I know that’s probably what most people will want me to do. I’ve certainly been thinking about it a lot, and I feel that, if I do restart it, I’ll likely take a game-mechanic-first approach.
As I’ve been reiterating, I think working on a game will be most rewarding for me if I can actually enjoy playing the game myself. Interns was always intended to have a semi-life-sim aspect to it with sex, willpower, and mind-control elements, so, armed with GPT coding assistance, perhaps I can tackle the core gameplay loop first, and revisit working the existing story sections back in, once I’ve got something I think is enjoyable to play.
“Short” Story-Based Game - When I first started playing with Stable Diffusion, I thought it’d be an interesting idea to use it to create artwork for a quick HTML-style branching-story-style game. AI art being new and novel, it’d be interesting to see how it would be received.
Of course, it’s been months since I actually *had* that idea and games with AI assets are everywhere now. Guess I was too slow. But the basic concept I had for the game still had a decent amount of fleshing out, so I could always do *something* with it.
Combat-Defeat RPG - CoC was my gateway from Oblivion modding to text games, and I’ve always wanted to make a game that focused more on the elements I enjoyed from the game. So, something less furry and waifu-centric, and more on exploration and combat defeat.
I have a sci-fi-based concept in mind that I’ve been fleshing out for years, and I haven’t gotten completely bored with it yet, so it seems like it could be one that could hold my interest for a while. It would, unfortunately, be very challenging code-wise.
Standard Life Sim…but Sci-Fi! - Another game concept I’ve been playing around with for a long time that actually came into being after I realized that a world I had created for an Alien-influenced story would make for a potentially interesting change of pace from the usual life sim game.
Rather than being someone who has just started exploring a new city, earning money, and meeting people, you’d be doing that…in space! …on a new colony world. The typical life sim mechanics would be there, but also space-drugs, body transformations, and the like.
Anime-Style Visual Novel? - This goes way back, but I’d originally been inspired to make Interns after seeing games being made by repurposing assets from Japanese visual novels. Those had the same drawbacks as real-porn games, however, as you couldn’t make anything that you didn’t have media for.
I had tried using AI over top of anime-style models before, but I’ve learned a lot since then, so it might be more doable now. A simple 2D art style could be easier for me to make changes and corrections to.
I do have some partial stories that I’ve worked on, taking place in my “Change Crystals” universe.
Anyway, I’m just tossing out a few of the ideas that have been rattling around in my brain for the last few months. I keep telling myself that I need to put together a “story concept sampler” project one of these days, that would give people story samples from each of the ideas to see which ones folks would be interested in, but I always get hung up on the presentation (I’d rather not just dump out text files—that’d be boring.)
Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope everyone has a Happy New Year!
Hi, all! Yes, it’s been an absurdly long time since the last update and I apologize for that.
I’ve suffered creative burnout in the past—where the very idea of even trying to sit down and create any kind of art or writing would fill me with dread and anxiety—but, I’m very happy to report that this is not the case for me right now.
In fact, I’ve been so busy using any and all free time to create stuff that I just couldn’t bring myself to sacrifice any of that time and energy to put together an update (though, I will admit that the guilt has been nagging at me for a long time now). I really don’t want to roll over into November without any kind of official update, so I guess today will be the day I “sacrifice” to let people know what’s going on.
Interns, Enjoyment, and Motivation
I doubt it’ll make many people happy to tell you that I haven’t done anything significant with Interns so far. My thoughts to go to it, repeatedly, but this mostly involves trying to figure out what would make me enjoy working on it as much as the other things I’ve been doing.
My running conclusion is that I don’t always enjoy the actual creative process as much as I used to. While it’s nice to see the art, writing, and coding all come together into something that people can enjoy, the moment of seeing the end product is, well, just that: a moment. Days/weeks/hours leading to a moment of: “Well, that was nice…back to work.”
It’s selfish, but I really want to find ways to get more enjoyment from what I work on.
I guess what I really need to do, is make a game that I can play and enjoy, too. So far, I haven’t quite figured out how to do that “easily.”
XCL
So, what have I been spending my time with? Well, modding other games is a big part of how I got into this in the first place. (I’ve explained in the past how my personal mods for Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas ultimately led me to erotic text games, TFGS, and inspired me to try to create my own.)
I was approached by, then, new developer Aphrodite a good while back to provide some suggestions/recommendations for the game X-Change Life, when it was in its very early stages. Since then, I’ve watched the rapid development of the game (with a strong degree of envy for the sheer speed at which it’s all coming along) and got hooked when the community came together to make it a very mod-friendly game.
My tendency for hyper-fixation being what it is, I’ve gotten really into making my own little mod additions to the game, in the interest of making the gameplay I most want to see (without having to be the one doing 99% of the core mechanics).
It’s great fun to be able to work on something for a weekend or two, then be able to plug it into the game and see how it changes the experience. I’ve gotten stuck into a bit of a loop, as well, as each play-through reveals other areas where I see something I’d like to change or expand, and, before I knew it, I had a bunch of projects on my plate.
I can’t say just how long this phase will last, but, in addition to modding, I’ve also been able to help out with the game in a semi-official capacity thanks to some of my new AI art skills.
(XCL has a really fun and open Discord community, too, which I tend to be active on, so check it out and you can see some of the stuff I’ve been working on over there.)
My XCL-Related Projects
For those who are unfamiliar, XCL is a life-sim-style game in the “X-Change Pill” universe. Originally inspired by the X-Change visual novel by Crowd, a community rose up around the idea of nearly magical gender-swapping pills. So, like Interns, the game is a continual schedule loop with work and free time activities.
Game content toward the beginning of development was mainly focused on the player character willingly experimenting with gender-change pills, but I’m personally more into involuntary use and peer pressure. So, most of my small mods have been along these lines.
I’ll share some of the art-related stuff here, as well as additional samples in the backer post.
Gameplay Tweaks
Not too much to say for these, but I’ve made a handful of gameplay-altering mods. Some make work harder, push the player into more sexual situations, add some involuntary transformations, and one adds a lore-friendly-ish outlet to the mall for non-X-Change pills. (I proposed a system for these pills that another modder picked up and ran with, so I’m thrilled to see that idea catching on.)
XCL - Female NPCs
For the male side of the game, there’s only been a small number of women the PC can approach at the bar. As I’ve already been exploring AI for creating stylized characters and repeatable characters, I thought it might be a fun idea to explore.
What I’ve ended up with is creating a prompt “formula” that has a high tendency to give very similar-looking women each time it’s used, so this can be used to make them in different outfits, states of dress, etc.
Mind that none of these are stylized; I kept things photo-real so that they can go through the same filter that's used on most of the images for the game.
None of this is in the game at this point, as it's all still “theoretical.”
Just Some Pretty Girls
What did get into the game are some of my AI creations (processed to better match the style of the game).
I originally had some of these made for my “Turn-Ons” series of mods. The general idea behind these is that I felt the male PC should occasionally run into beautiful women who would turn him on (since there wasn’t really a mechanic for that in the game).
I’ve made batches of images for different locations: the mall, the club, the gym, the beach.
In the case of the workplace, I had a special request to produce a busty secretary for the DynaPill office. I generated a ton of these, but here are just a few.
Story Content
It’s probably a huge mistake, but I found that, for one of my existing mods, I thought the entire thing would be so much better if there were some little story segments to go along with. These would need to be somewhat unpredictable so that I could play through them and not know exactly what to expect each time.
Sadly, something I thought would be simple quickly ended up being very complicated: A lot of planning out branching logic, figuring out how to use XCL’s mechanics for creating, saving, and recalling NPCs, and the like.
I did have some fun generating the NPCs I needed for the story sections, though. There are police officers, geeks, regular guys, and some scary psycho types.
The Talisman
And for something that isn’t XCL-related… I have a project, titled The Talisman, which I’ve worked on here and there.
When I first started working with Stable Diffusion, I thought it might be great to throw together a “simple” story with a handful of characters, and put out a “small” game—if I could do it fast enough, it’d be one of the first instances of a game using AI-generated art…
…and I was way too slow, and the world has passed me by. (Seriously, I’m already way behind with tech, as I’m still using SD 1.5!)
That said, I do toy with the idea periodically, and keep working on “formulas” or LoRAs for the characters.
I’ll share a few samples of a recent attempt at the player character.
More AI Art Exploration
On the subject of AI art, I’ve done a lot more exploration into it. I’ll save a lot of the samples for the backer post, however. Much of the work has been focused on figuring out how to create art styles that can be applied to different models, finding ways of creating characters that can be reproduced, and, in a few cases, trying to see if I can create things I need for various scenes I want to do. The latter, sadly, hasn’t gone as smoothly as I would have liked, though—I’m assuming much of that will be solved by upgrading technology for better poses and hands.
Conclusion
Whew! I started writing this post and assembling the images for it, first thing this morning, and I’m now into the early evening. I imagine it’ll be the end of the day once it’s all been assembled and posted. I do hope it helps give a small look into what I’ve been playing with these last few months. Honestly, there was so much that I didn’t even start to address since I would have been here for another day or two if that were the case.
As always, I’m still active on the Discord, and I haven’t forgotten about everyone here. Thanks for sticking with me!
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