AAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH Dev Log #11

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Hello~, I hope everyone is enjoying the last vestiges of Winter!

I'm currently sitting at just over 1,000 new renders, which is officially bigger than the previous update (but that was, of course, the smallest update I've released so far). Development, in general, has been going well in the sense that I've been able to dedicate a lot of time to the project and I'm having a lot of fun doing it, but it's all just taking so much longer than I want it to. My predictions for how long scenes will take me to finish feel all messed up. I didn't want to post this dev log, for example, until I got to a specific point in my script which I figured would take me about a week, but it took me 3 weeks and I can't point to any specific thing that went wrong to cause that. It just took that long. I think as I grow as a developer and learn more about rendering, lighting, coding, posing, etc., things are starting to take more time instead of less. It's like I'm in some limbo where I now know about all of the tools I have at my disposal to make something good, but I'm not quite good enough to use all of it proficiently/quickly. It used to be that I would throw my characters into a scene, do the bare minimum to get my ideas across, and code it altogether, but now that I know more and am capable of really visualizing what I want, everything is moving so much slower. It feels good to see progress—it feels good to not settle for something when trying to create a scene—but it's kind of making me miserable. There's nothing I want more than to release content as often as possible, but the pace I'm moving at is driving me crazy!

If I'm being completely honest, I'm only at about the halfway point of my script for Day 4 (full day, not split into day and night like the last two updates), and I think I'm going to have to make some hard decisions soon in an attempt to get the update out sooner—whether that is cutting the update in half, shifting some things around, cutting some fatty ideas. I'm really struggling! As a small developer, I quite literally can't afford to take so long to release things, but I also don't want to release a small update just for the sake of getting one out. My last update was small because it was focused and planned to be that way, but this one was always supposed to be roughly the same length as the first two chapters which were kind of enormous. Maybe I just need to remind myself that while chapters 1 and 2 were really huge, they were also super ugly and needed to be redone lol. Uff da. I don't know, man. Sorry for the downer dev log, but I've really been struggling with this lately!

On a more upbeat note, I'm currently in two bundles on Itch.io alongside a lot of amazing developers and games! These bundles used to do really well but have suffered a lot since the Itch de-indexing fiasco. They're still a great way to discover new games, though, so please make sure to give them both a look! The first bundle is for Valentine's Day and the second is in celebration of Chinese New Year!

1) The Valentine's Adult Games bundle collects 115 games for the low price of pay-what-you-want! This bundle does feature stretch goals, though, including special renders. Pickle is already hard at work doing a Valentine's themed photoshoot with Lily, Abby, Billie, and Sasha (as well as her and me!)

2) The Year of the Fire Horse - NSFW bundle collects 82 games at a discounted price of $15 (usually over $100). There is a lot of great stuff in here, but—in the interest of full transparency—there is AI-generated content in there, as well.

Anyway, that's really all I have as far as information to give out. I am more than halfway done with what I have planned for the next update, but plans may shift. Closer to the next update than the last one, but I'll keep everyone updated.

Not exciting, but I will, more than likely, be releasing a hot-fix update for the game soon, which will fix some coding errors, and that'll include some updated renders/animations and a re-designed gallery courtesy of Moon over in the Discord server (if I can get it all to work).

I love you guys.

cure~