Overdue

Hi, all! Yes, it’s been an absurdly long time since the last update and I apologize for that.
I’ve suffered creative burnout in the past—where the very idea of even trying to sit down and create any kind of art or writing would fill me with dread and anxiety—but, I’m very happy to report that this is not the case for me right now.
In fact, I’ve been so busy using any and all free time to create stuff that I just couldn’t bring myself to sacrifice any of that time and energy to put together an update (though, I will admit that the guilt has been nagging at me for a long time now). I really don’t want to roll over into November without any kind of official update, so I guess today will be the day I “sacrifice” to let people know what’s going on.


Interns, Enjoyment, and Motivation
I doubt it’ll make many people happy to tell you that I haven’t done anything significant with Interns so far. My thoughts to go to it, repeatedly, but this mostly involves trying to figure out what would make me enjoy working on it as much as the other things I’ve been doing.
My running conclusion is that I don’t always enjoy the actual creative process as much as I used to. While it’s nice to see the art, writing, and coding all come together into something that people can enjoy, the moment of seeing the end product is, well, just that: a moment. Days/weeks/hours leading to a moment of: “Well, that was nice…back to work.”
It’s selfish, but I really want to find ways to get more enjoyment from what I work on.
I guess what I really need to do, is make a game that I can play and enjoy, too. So far, I haven’t quite figured out how to do that “easily.”


XCL
So, what have I been spending my time with? Well, modding other games is a big part of how I got into this in the first place. (I’ve explained in the past how my personal mods for Oblivion, Fallout 3, and New Vegas ultimately led me to erotic text games, TFGS, and inspired me to try to create my own.)
I was approached by, then, new developer Aphrodite a good while back to provide some suggestions/recommendations for the game X-Change Life, when it was in its very early stages. Since then, I’ve watched the rapid development of the game (with a strong degree of envy for the sheer speed at which it’s all coming along) and got hooked when the community came together to make it a very mod-friendly game.
My tendency for hyper-fixation being what it is, I’ve gotten really into making my own little mod additions to the game, in the interest of making the gameplay I most want to see (without having to be the one doing 99% of the core mechanics).
It’s great fun to be able to work on something for a weekend or two, then be able to plug it into the game and see how it changes the experience. I’ve gotten stuck into a bit of a loop, as well, as each play-through reveals other areas where I see something I’d like to change or expand, and, before I knew it, I had a bunch of projects on my plate.
I can’t say just how long this phase will last, but, in addition to modding, I’ve also been able to help out with the game in a semi-official capacity thanks to some of my new AI art skills.
(XCL has a really fun and open Discord community, too, which I tend to be active on, so check it out and you can see some of the stuff I’ve been working on over there.)


My XCL-Related Projects
For those who are unfamiliar, XCL is a life-sim-style game in the “X-Change Pill” universe. Originally inspired by the X-Change visual novel by Crowd, a community rose up around the idea of nearly magical gender-swapping pills. So, like Interns, the game is a continual schedule loop with work and free time activities.
Game content toward the beginning of development was mainly focused on the player character willingly experimenting with gender-change pills, but I’m personally more into involuntary use and peer pressure. So, most of my small mods have been along these lines.
I’ll share some of the art-related stuff here, as well as additional samples in the backer post.


Gameplay Tweaks
Not too much to say for these, but I’ve made a handful of gameplay-altering mods. Some make work harder, push the player into more sexual situations, add some involuntary transformations, and one adds a lore-friendly-ish outlet to the mall for non-X-Change pills. (I proposed a system for these pills that another modder picked up and ran with, so I’m thrilled to see that idea catching on.)


XCL - Female NPCs
For the male side of the game, there’s only been a small number of women the PC can approach at the bar. As I’ve already been exploring AI for creating stylized characters and repeatable characters, I thought it might be a fun idea to explore.
What I’ve ended up with is creating a prompt “formula” that has a high tendency to give very similar-looking women each time it’s used, so this can be used to make them in different outfits, states of dress, etc.
Mind that none of these are stylized; I kept things photo-real so that they can go through the same filter that's used on most of the images for the game.
 
 
 
None of this is in the game at this point, as it's all still “theoretical.”

Just Some Pretty Girls
What did get into the game are some of my AI creations (processed to better match the style of the game).
I originally had some of these made for my “Turn-Ons” series of mods. The general idea behind these is that I felt the male PC should occasionally run into beautiful women who would turn him on (since there wasn’t really a mechanic for that in the game).
I’ve made batches of images for different locations: the mall, the club, the gym, the beach.
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the case of the workplace, I had a special request to produce a busty secretary for the DynaPill office. I generated a ton of these, but here are just a few.
 
 


Story Content
It’s probably a huge mistake, but I found that, for one of my existing mods, I thought the entire thing would be so much better if there were some little story segments to go along with. These would need to be somewhat unpredictable so that I could play through them and not know exactly what to expect each time.
Sadly, something I thought would be simple quickly ended up being very complicated: A lot of planning out branching logic, figuring out how to use XCL’s mechanics for creating, saving, and recalling NPCs, and the like.
I did have some fun generating the NPCs I needed for the story sections, though. There are police officers, geeks, regular guys, and some scary psycho types.
 
 

The Talisman
And for something that isn’t XCL-related… I have a project, titled The Talisman, which I’ve worked on here and there.
When I first started working with Stable Diffusion, I thought it might be great to throw together a “simple” story with a handful of characters, and put out a “small” game—if I could do it fast enough, it’d be one of the first instances of a game using AI-generated art…
…and I was way too slow, and the world has passed me by. (Seriously, I’m already way behind with tech, as I’m still using SD 1.5!)
That said, I do toy with the idea periodically, and keep working on “formulas” or LoRAs for the characters.
I’ll share a few samples of a recent attempt at the player character.
 
 

More AI Art Exploration
On the subject of AI art, I’ve done a lot more exploration into it. I’ll save a lot of the samples for the backer post, however. Much of the work has been focused on figuring out how to create art styles that can be applied to different models, finding ways of creating characters that can be reproduced, and, in a few cases, trying to see if I can create things I need for various scenes I want to do. The latter, sadly, hasn’t gone as smoothly as I would have liked, though—I’m assuming much of that will be solved by upgrading technology for better poses and hands.


Conclusion
Whew! I started writing this post and assembling the images for it, first thing this morning, and I’m now into the early evening. I imagine it’ll be the end of the day once it’s all been assembled and posted. I do hope it helps give a small look into what I’ve been playing with these last few months. Honestly, there was so much that I didn’t even start to address since I would have been here for another day or two if that were the case.
As always, I’m still active on the Discord, and I haven’t forgotten about everyone here. Thanks for sticking with me!