Hey everyone, I hope you've all been enjoying Chapter 1! I've been taking a couple of days to sit down and reflect on the release and what I've learned as Taste of Life is my first attempt at executing a story in the form of a VN. I'm now back in the swing of things, so here's what I'll be working on during the next month or so for Chapter 2:

Character Profiles

Before working on the story proper, I like to work on the characters first as this allows me to make sure that I can give each character a purpose and a proper arc. I want to avoid the problem of having many characters just cuz.

Character Designs

Next I'll be working on the character designs, try to have them match the characters' personalities as much as possible. I'll also be working on designs for a handful of "bonus waifus" that Patrons will be able to vote on which ones to include in Chapter 2. The bonus waifus will have more of a minor role in the story and they will probably be there for just one chapter, unless there's a demand for them to return later on or I somehow find a way to make them fit in future chapters. I'll be posting previews of the character designs exclusively for Patrons.

Chapter 2 Overview & Script

The most important thing that I will be doing in this part is not only fully writing the story and dialogue, but also separating it into chunks. For Chapter 1, I would release an update when I felt like I had done enough work, but with chunking, this will help set clear lines on where an appropriate amount of work has been done to release an update.

Download a New Version of the Engine

Now, the engine that I work on is a pretty old version. I'll have to redownload it completely with the new content, and it's pretty hefty so RIP my bandwidth.

Map Design

After being done with the script and updating the engine, I'll be working on maps. There are tons of premade maps that come with the engine, but it happened a few times in Chapter 1 where there were no maps for some specific situations, so I had to create them from scratch. This will likely happen for Chapter 2 as well. I'll be posting some previews of the maps for Patrons and some for the public on Patreon and itch.io.

Work on Renders

Finally, I'll get to working on the renders and animations. Now, while I have made some progress in creating better renders, you probably have noticed on annoying thing that still plague my renders: aliasing, or jagged edges.

There's an option that I played with in the engine last year that allows you to render an image internally at a higher quality and downscale it at 1080p, resulting in a better quality image. As I tested it with 2x, 3x and 4x the resolution, but stuck to 1x for Chapter 1. Now that we're moving on to Chapter 2, I want to up the quality of my renders again, and I've been playing again with the 2x, 3x and 4x options and settled on working with the 2x option for Chapter 2 for a two reasons:

1. Rendering still images in 2x, 3x and 4x is fine, but when it comes to animations, anything higher than 2x seems to make the engine crash on my PC.

2. Using 2x, 3x and 4x messes with the Depth of Field effect. At 2x, you can still see the background blur, but more than that the DoF effect is pretty much negated.

Now maybe those two issues will get resolved when I download the updated version of the engine, but for now I'm sticking to 2x, which honestly looks pretty damn good. I've attached 2 images below, open them and compare them side to side, you'll see a big different in Lily's hair, it brings more life to her eyes and it adds more details to the lighting.

Normal

2x

For Chapter 2, the majority of render previews will be Patron exclusive and some will be available to the public on Patreon and on Itch.io.

Well, that's it for now. I'll see you guys later when I'll have more to share. Meanwhile, take great care of yourselves!