Dev Diary 4

HI there, GIL here.

First of all, development of chapter 2 is going quite well. We're currently sitting at 1220 images, knee deep in the 4th heroine "date" from a total of 5. You can rest assured, we're putting crunch type hours every single day on the project, and the progress shows. Many, many amazing scenes straight from the mind of my partner have already been brought to life, and we're very happy with them.

Regarding the poll we recently made about the release time and format, I wanted to say, we heard you loud and clear. You guys got out back and are in no rush. Frankly, that is great to hear! Even so, we might go ahead and release the first 5 days of ch2 as an update, considering it's currently very close to ch1 in size. We'll see when we're done with them, which shouldn't be too far ahead.

Anyway, let me rant a bit about my side of development :3

I don't know if most of you are familiar with Honey Select, the game we use to create the visuals of Pale Carnations. It's almost four years old, and at this point somewhat dated, but no other Illusion game has received the amount of mods and assets HS has. Not even close. To give you an idea, the base game is around 6 to 10GB in size. My HS installation is 291GB.

That gives us huge flexibility for locations and props. I don't even know what I have until I type it in the item search ^^; Some of it is a bit old and low quality tho, not really up to par to the standard we're trying to maintain in PC. Fortunately, my friend Saint has been providing us with DAZ asset ports at very reasonable prices. If you're looking for some asset porting to any Illusion game, send him a DM. I highly recommend his services.

But even with these high quality assets, there is a lot of work fine-tuning everything to make it look just right. I used to be a modder myself and that gives me a basic understanding of what needs to be done, but it's still a huge undertaking. Most of the location maps you've seen in PC have been carefully retouched mesh by mesh! Here's an example I'm quite proud of:

I know, I know, we shouldn't brag about our visuals considering we're using an inferior program compared to the likes of the visually stunning DAZ, but I just wanted you to know I have an almost autistic level of commitment with detail and polish. This little knife might not be a shotgun, but it does the job just fine with a lil extra push :3