This morning, I just want to give you an idea of the quality upgrade you can expect with the release of Chapter 1. I think I've said it before, but I have to restate the slight redesign coming up for Carmina's CGs. In the original design, she had glossy, marble like eyes that looked more like evil crystal balls or something. Now she has a striking, hot gaze. Not a natural eye color, I know, but by 2069, I like to think that cosmetic surgery for eye color will be advanced enough for this kind of thing, beyond contacts, or the sketchy practice of tattooing the whites. This color also matches the color I've associated with the character.

Additionally, sans the CGs and scenes with Carmina, you will see a massive upgrade to the quality of scenes shortly after the point where 0.01 ends. Not going to tell you specifically where, because then we'd have some spoilers. In any case, here is a spoiler free preview scene to showcase the increase in quality:

As you can see, the grainy nature of scenes is gone, and the lighting is a lot more daring. This is because of a spectacular driver update for my hardware that was specifically designed for digital content creators. Not only is that amazing on its face, but it also let me use my GPU for rendering, instead of loading the job of rendering completely on my CPU. This also has the added bonus of cutting my render times down to a fraction of what they were. The image above, for example, only took about a half an hour to render out. The introduction scene for Dominique, which is comparable in lighting and polygon count (the biggest contributions to render time and integrity), was an overnight deal. It took 13 and a half hours, and still wasn't as sharp as the image above.

My priority right now is getting the Chapter 1 update out. After that, though, I will be releasing small updates between big chapter updates that will address a lot of earlier scenes that are still grainy and/or lackluster in composition. Some things that are more immediately on that list are the opening news scene, and Naomi along with the unique scenes featuring her. I like her design over all, but there's something off about it that I can quite put my finger on.

-Sincerely,

R.S. Cree