Update: Jun—ly?! 2023

Wait, it’s July? Where the heck did June go?!
So, it’s been a busy almost-two months for me, and I have to admit, I’ve gotten so absorbed with some of the stuff I’ve been playing around with, that I couldn’t bring myself to stop and write a post about what I’ve been doing.
I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been motivated to work on creative endeavors. I’ve tried doing this post a few times now—stopping and restarting as I try to think of the best way to go over everything. For this attempt, I think I’ll just work backwards; checking through my files and folders as a revisit what all I’ve done.

Game Modding
In what I feel is a somewhat positive sign, I’ve been doing some coding again. Some of you may recall me mentioning that I originally decided to try making a game after I had made a few mods for Oblivion and Fallout New Vegas (and, earlier than that, I was modifying other people’s mods for those games).
I got the bug after playing a bit of X-Change Life and finding myself a bit frustrated that it doesn’t have content that covers my preferred playstyle just yet.
In the interest of making the game more fun for me while I wait on official development, I created a few mods to complement some of the other mods out there. For those who play XCL, you can find my mods where all the other mods for that game are, with mine being:
  • Forced Bar Visits
  • Mean Leads
  • AI Art Replacer
  • Bring Her Back

AI Text
Only just scratched the surface on this one, but I was introduced to SillyTavern recently as a way to use some of the best features of Novel AI and AI Dungeon (lore-books, memory, and author’s note) in combination with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. I’m interested in exploring this as a replacement for NAI as a writing aid, hoping that it will be better able to keep track of the types of very basic plot points that previous AI just couldn’t handle.
Prior to that, I’ve been using AI to help with modding and coding, as pasting code into GPT-4 and just asking questions seems to be a much faster way to learn what things do than searching for answers online.

AI Art
My AI art fixation is finally starting to wane somewhat. I’m still playing around with it, but it’s no longer the “all day/all night” obsession it’s been for…however many months. I’m still working on refining my model-training methods, and I still have a few other ideas I want to explore eventually.
I’ve taken up a couple of tasks for others. In the case of X-Change Life, I’ve been asked to see if I can create a model of Brendan Fraser in his early twenties… This has been a bit more challenging than expected, given the quality of the photos I’ve found of him from that time.
The other project I’ve been working on is a paper-doll-style character model for the game Clean Slate. Considering everything I went through creating the “Avatar” system for Interns, I was curious to see what it might be like to try to make those kinds of assets with AI.
There have been a ton of other things I’ve played around with:
  • Creating new style LoRAs
  • Training models on real people (and making stylized versions of them)
  • A few attempts at creating backgrounds
  • Trying to get around the AI’s aversion to male genitalia

I’ll share an assortment of these in the backer post.

Future AI Stuff
Something I still want to explore with AI is video. I’ve been interested in trying something with EbSynth for a while now, and I can’t help but feel that combining it with Stable Diffusion might lead to interesting results.
I foresee a ton of challenges, though. I’m sure I’ll need to figure out how to segment the AI images to apply different prompts to different people/areas of the video. I’ll need ways of masking out and replacing backgrounds. Figuring out what video clips to use and where to get them could be a challenge, too; I’d already considered working on animation with Honey Select, so I could see using those renders as a base…

Interns
I’ve been thinking about Interns a bit more, and how I’d like to approach getting back into it. A part of me really wants to work on the basic foundation of the game, and get all the core mechanics working, without too much worry over graphics and story.
Since the last time I tried, AI has evolved as a helpful too, and I’ve already tried a few experiments where I’ve asked the AI to give me feedback on how to improve some of the existing code for the game (the willpower check system).
I’d still love for Interns to have working game mechanics that would make portions of the game fun for *me* to play, even as the game’s creator, and that’s something that’s always been lacking about it.