Catching Heat Technical Demo (0.0.20)
Disclaimer: These are alpha-quality builds. Our AI artist is still in learning. Do not expect visual quality.
This week's changes include:
Visual asset updates
Voice asset updates
Minor wardrobe changes
This is it! The final technical demo. We have achieved our goal of building technology which is capable of building a reasonably attractive visual novel. There is still a ways to go but we are excited to build out the rest of Catching Heat and some other games we have planned for the future including sequels to Euryale's and Elena's story in Catching Heat.
Knows Issues
There are a few outstanding issues with the models that we expect to be resolved in the coming weeks. First, male "gens" (generated images) are not as male as they should be. We only recently added male models to the training set and so it will take a little while for our AI systems to learn them. In addition, any time you add data to the training set, quality of existing gens can take a step back. Many of the attribute capabilities and some of the face renders seem to have taken a hit.
Secondly, Euryale's voice is still in progress. It may take a few more weeks of training for it to get to the quality we would like. One we understand what it takes to get good AI voices, we will add voices for more characters.
What's Next?
We know it takes about 3-weeks after adding new data for the model to learn and quality to be restored. New scenes often require new data to be added. Instead of waiting 3-weeks to add new scenes, we want to continue to add new scenes in our weekly builds whenever possible. That means at first, the quality of the new scenes might be poor. During the time the model is stabilizing, we will refrain from adding new data. At the end of the 3-week stabilizing period, we will do a final week of testing and then release to the public. This means releases every month.
As a reward for our supporters, weekly builds will be patreon-only moving forward. If you would like to help, please consider becoming a patreon.
Our goal is for 0.1.0 to be released October 30th in a special Halloween Edition.
