Hello again everyone. It seems January has been a hectic month for me, but not really straining my dev time yet. Last week I was fighting an upper respiratory infection, my wife and I both. Got over that mess only to catch a common cold yesterday. It sucks, but I can sit at my desk and work... and work I will. But going to bed a lot earlier to make sure I get plenty of rest and drinking plenty of fluids. Taking some meds and taking it easy. Also, on Wednesday evening, my wife's mother passed away. She was in a nursing home. So that sucks. My wife is taking it fairly well as we were kind of expecting it. Anyway, moving on...

So, there were 16 scenes originally. I changed that to 17 scenes because I realized looking over my code that I hadn't divided some of them up correctly. Quick easy fix. I completed scene 4 on Wednesday and got right into scene 5. Scene 4 was an event with Celeste mainly, and the other girls spying. It's a cute scene I think you guys will enjoy. Scene 5 isn't quite as long as 4 was. It will be an event with Melody and also Celeste. These events are wrapping up what I had talked about in previous devlogs... sending 'guests' back to their worlds. Moving some secondary characters around is a part of this episode, but not the main focus. We're also getting back on the main arc of Serenity itself, the dark flame and all that stuff. You'll see. Hopefully, you'll also notice that Mike (MC) is going to be much more confident in what choices he makes and how he handles things. Mike from Serenity, and Mike from Last Human should have nearly identical personalities (as will be the case for future projects). Of course, there will be some differences, but both are supposed to be "you", both are in a leading position, and both are also 'gentlemen'.

Well, I'm always telling you guys my plans and ideas for Serenity, Last Human, and even future projects like Viral Affair. As you know, I got started doing this with Serenity (hence the cringy beginning). With Last Human, I hoped to get more serious in my writing. I've already made it known that Serenity chapter 2 will be the end of that project (for now). I have plans to go back and clean up the first Serenity, but other than that, I'm ready to see the end of the story and move on to Viral Affair (or another project). Last Human is just getting started and may have another "season" of episodes when this first one is completed - which should be about 9 episodes. I plan to use the same format for the next project. Anyway, I brought that up because I'm thinking Viral Affair will be the next project. I've been taking some time here and there to write for it and the more I do that, the more I am liking it for a VN. It will be a single 'game' / story. Of course, this could change as I have quite a few stories that could work great as visual novels. But VA does seem like a logical next move for me.

Finally, one of the things I spend a lot of time on when making my games is facial expressions. All this time I've been doing that manually with the controls available to me in studio. However, I have decided to try out some presets and have already added a pack of those from a modder. After trying these out, I am really happy with how they look! This will save me a little time when posing/rendering each image as well. Along with that, I am starting to use presets for poses. Yes, I'm the dumbass that has pretty much done that manually all this time or used built-in poses then modifying them. I'm hoping this change will help move the rendering process along a bit faster. But at some point, I want to start saving some of my own original poses because I put a lot of work into them.

That's all for this week guys and gals. Image is a preview from scene 2. Mike takes Cammie with him into Fereldan's world. It turns out she knows a lot more about this world than he thought and will play an important role in what is coming.

As always, love you all! ...Fire