It's a Skill Issue

 

This month has been jammed packed and has made me exhausted. Hosting guests for a few weeks and then looking for additional work to make ends meet on top of existing work commitments has me struggling to scrounge the creative energy to get things done like I wanted. I at least managed to keep (for now) my self-made promise to not buy any new games until after first release.

But enough of my excuses, what have I managed to do so far?

I’ve managed a lot less writing than I wanted to for Piety than needed for the release. I’ve hit some minor writers block that I’m remedying with some short story practice. I’ve had a recurring fantasy about a hero and his wolf girl companion just going ham with breeding making the poor girl just huge. I’m drawing inspiration from Setsuna of Redo of Healer fame and Fenrys from Chilling in Another World. I generated this post’s image with that vision in mind. It should be just a few chapters long in total, and I’ll need the critique which I’m sure will help with writing for Piety. I’ll host it somewhere like deviant art or AO3and link back to the blog once it’s ready.

I’ve also performed some tests with stable diffusion webui-forge, which is something of an improvement over automatic1111. There’s just so much knowledge and cutting-edge stuff when it comes to this that it’s hard not to feel constantly behind the curve. One major obstacle I’m facing is using different checkpoint models. The nun images I’ve shared so far having been generating using an SDXL model, which while looking great, doesn’t have the same level of support that the older SD1.5 model has. The image shared here is using the SD1.5 model with the support of a hyper proportion Lora. It works well, but the amount of trial and error in prompts required is extreme, compared to the SDXL model. It will take me more time to establish a work-flow that I will want to use for Piety.

In short, I did some more research for the project, but the end of the month goal to release Piety alpha version is looking mighty unreasonable. Instead, I am aiming for at least my short story release by then. It honestly is a skill issue: I can code a storm, but my writing and art stinks still. Hopefully, I can get better, and soon

Tick Tock