This update is a day earlier than usual, just because I felt like doing it this evening. Progress is pretty good overall. This one has at times felt like a bit of a slog, mainly because of the complexity of a few of the scenes. It's also partly due to the inability of either me to be able to use the tools in the way I need to, or the fact the tools simply can't do exactly what I want. It's part of the reason why the AI bubble is at the point of bursting and why it isn't going to be the apocalypse people fear. They are just too uncooperative and inconsistent to replace humans.

I use AI stuff at work and we use it to ask it questions about things we haven't considered as part of a project design, what things we should consider when a customer will encounter a process. It's really useful for that kind of thing because it tends to point out or suggest things we hadn't thought about and then we go off and work on how to take account of that. Because it absolutely cannot come up with effective solutions itself. We also use image generation tools to quickly generate mock-ups to help people see what the intention is of a new design or process. Something a colleague of mine said today struck me... "We do this stuff really quickly, it would take months normally to get these sorts of mock-ups, but we can get them in minutes. Then we play around with it all until we are happy we know what we are asking for and then we hand it off to the real designers. to produce the proper ones." I find I'm sometimes seeing "mock-ups" of what I want to put on screen and dearly wishing I could afford a designer to hand them off to to do it properly. It's mainly stuff like combat sequences, which require more specific and complicated placing of characters. There are tools to help with this and I do use them, but what they aren't good at is when you need to do this sort of specific placement with more than one character at a time. I've worked out a method by getting the sprites I want to use, then animating them into a sequence. Which tends to produce laughably bad results when it comes to combat. But... those laughably bad results do produce occasionally glimpses of what I want. And I can screenshot those glimpses. An example of that is in the images here, but that's how I'm trying to get round the bottleneck of the inability of AI image generators to do good combat poses between 2 or more characters.

In terms of progress... almost all the sprites are in, there is still about half of one combat sequence to do. Most of the animations are done. I've written and scripted in the full romance sequence, taking the word count up to around 12.5k now. I've started adding the music and sound effects today, which I'm about 30% through the script for. Over the next week I'll be adding in the side images, finalising that combat sequence and all the sound and audio. After that I'll be working and testing the next version of the mission manager and updating the character screens and codex's. I expect early access to be released around 1st October, assuming there are no major problems to foul it up.

Some stats so far:

29 backgrounds, 5 of which are animated.

52 sprites of Emelia and 17 animations focused on her. I still have many animations to cut and edit before adding them in for the romance screen.

9 sprites of the player, one animation to add focused on him, he appears in a number of the other animations with other characters.

7 Sprites and 2 animations of Xanthe.

8 sprites of Kaisa, 3 images of her.

4 sprites and 7 animations of other characters.

12,500 words and approximately 1700 lines of script.