Precious Little Time

This is mostly going to be a recap of what was said in the Precious Kouhai v0.3 preview on Patreon and Subscribestar, but with a little extra detail. And without the image, so if you want to see what PK looks like now that I'm using GraphicsMod, you're gonna have to click a link and go over there.

 

The main thing I want to call out is that Precious Kouhai is highly likely to end up even shorter than I originally intended. Aside from it being a practice project that I'm mostly only taking the time to complete so I don't have to say I abandoned it, I don't have a ton of time to work on it right now. The original plan was to double the size of the updates so there'd be four new scenes in v0.3's release this Friday, and four or five new scenes in v1.0's release at the end of February, but the time it takes to render more than doubled due to all the extra work HS2 needs to do with all the added mods. That makes it a lot harder to crank out all the minor animations, even if creating them using the newer techniques I've learned means it only takes a couple minutes instead of nearly an hour to animate a breathing cycle.

 

That doesn't change the plan for Precious Kouhai, though. Things might be different if the reception for it was better, but I'm perfectly okay with the reception for it being what it is. I don't have a lot of interest in making do-nothing VNs about getting laid; I want to make more games like Maids & Masters. PK not being popular means I can finish it off to say it's finished and move on to the next project (one of which has finally pulled ahead as we get closer to the deadline - more on that this Friday on Patreon/Substar). It also means I'm very comfortable sticking to the release schedule and letting that dictate how much content I have time to make. If all I get done is two scenes worth of content, that's all that'll be in the update, and then we get to move on to something more exciting.

 

Precious Kouhai news aside, most of my attention is going into Divine Intervention at the moment. With the prologue finally published and playable, I need to get Chapter 1 written and at least mostly set in place so ChainZ can get to work on the renders without needing to worry about something changing significantly enough to warrant changing a render. If you want to read specifics, there are dev logs being posted by ChainZ, so I won't get too deep into the details here. You can click that link and read up for yourself.

 

There's also the usual real life distractions (though those are mercifully few and minor, even if one of them is the encroaching tax season), a new Noditu bundle on the way as we approach Valentine's Day, and some bonus material for Divine Intervention that I won't talk about much beyond mentioning that I'm working on it because I have no idea when it'll be done and we haven't fully decided how it'll be distributed yet. I'm also still working out some of the details on how to best use all the new assets and tools I have in HS2, which is something else that's stopping me from making more of PK even though that time is spent working on PK.

 

So yeah, despite my wanting to take it easy and slow down for the start of 2026 with Maids & Masters functionally complete, I'm still keeping myself plenty busy. 

Precious Little Sanity

I've managed to find enough workarounds that it's not actually impacting my workflow (or, more accurately, it's not impacting my workflow enough to stop me from working entirely) anymore, but updating all of these assets came with their own fun and unique downsides.

 

One such downside was that certain parts of the character models I'm working with (like the teeth and gums) weren't loading in the new textures correctly once placed in the studio environment so I could start posing and animating. What made this so frustrating and difficult to fix was that when I was in the dedicated character editor, the textures seemed to load fine and I didn't have the issue. This only got worse when I tried to reset the textures, because whatever way the new texture didn't load in correctly now applied to all textures for that part of the character within the studio. With the help of another dev, I found a workaround, but it required me to basically hard reset the character's entire head, which also reset every other updated texture, which meant spending more time updating Kouhai than animating her, especially any time you needed to see her teeth. Incredibly frustrated for a character that's supposed to be one that does a lot of smiling. And teeth weren't the only body part that had this issue - Senpai had his own problems.

 

The upshot of this is that it forced me to learn a few new things and get familiar with a few more new assets that opened up a few more new possibilities. Obviously it's pretty far from perfect since it's the first time I'm using some of these, but practice makes perfect, and that's what Precious Kouhai is for. All of this is going to go a long way toward making the visuals of my next major project much higher quality. And hopefully I'll have most of the jank ironed out by the time I start working on it.

 

I obviously still expect to get better over time as I use all these tools, both new and old. Putting time into individual animations is a big part of how good they look, and part of what I'm trying to improve on right now is speed. Which of course means the other thing currently driving me up a wall is trying to avoid spending three hours animating a custom walk cycle that I only need to work for about three steps, but knowing walk cycles are really difficult to animate and time correctly and actually having to figure it out for myself are two very, very different things. It'll probably still look at least a little weird if you actually stop and look at it (or roll back and replay it a bunch of times, since it only plays once before the game moves on) but I at least got it to a point where Kouhai didn't look like she was shifting into gear and sliding off-screen, and that's good enough for now.

 

There's plenty of other little bits that I still need to put some time into figuring out, but at the very least, I've learned some new things - which is always good - and I'm able to get some animating done - which means Precious Kouhai won't do what Maids & Masters did and balloon into taking more than twice as long to finish developing as I expected it to because it got more complicated the further into development I got.

Precious Little Storage Space

One of the many things I've been looking forward to doing once Maids & Masters hit v1.0 is updating a bunch of my assets and tools so that I'd be able to move entirely away from using things that are 10+ years out of date. However, now that I've done so, my first business expense of 2026 needs to be storage space.

 

See, while I already have 2TB of storage to work with in the form of two separate 1TB drives, I'm far from some giant game studio, so that 2TB is on my one and only PC. I don't have a separate workstation with another 2TB of storage. I don't have a storage rack to keep backups and archives of renders and game files. I don't have the income to pay for premium accounts large enough to store it all online. I definitely don't have a ton of space left over to install games, whether they're for research or just for fun.

 

This hasn't been a problem before now because my work files have only been about 300GB. That leaves more than enough space for me to create redundant backups on one drive and keep the rest of it for personal use, and keep the other drive as a "work drive." Updating HS2 so I could improve my visuals and familiarize myself with GraphicsMod along the way for the remaining development of Precious Kouhai, however, was another 400GB. And not 400GB of updates - 400GB of new files and assets. HS2 alone now measures well over 700GB, meaning there's really no room on my work drive for anything else. Including the game files for my projects. I had to take the majority of my stuff off that drive just to have space to complete the update, and now that it's done, I can't really put all that stuff back, even after pruning a couple hundred GB of old and unused stuff I don't need to retain. Having a drive that close to full isn't great for a number of reasons that I won't get into here, but suffice to say I need to upgrade, and with AI making everything worse for everybody, that's not going to be cheap. 

 

The good news is that - outside of one specific bug that's stopping me from getting any actual rendering done - I'm really happy with the jump in visual quality. I still have a few things to learn and dial in the rest of the way, but I think you'll be happy with the new visuals, too. It makes me that much more excited to dig into the next major project once PK is done.

 

Speaking of, you're probably sick of me reminding you by now, but if you have an opinion about what I should be doing next, there are polls both public and supporter-only on both Patreon and Subscribestar. I want your opinion, and there's only a few clicks between you and deciding where my time goes.

Another Grain Through The Hourglass - 2025 Year In Review

Phew.

Of all the years, 2025 sure was one of them, wasn't it?

A massive wave of censorship, legislation passing to encourage and empower more censorship, economic turmoil, and so many more things that had such a broad and terrible impact on so many people - myself very much included - that only want to make their art and share it with others.

But despite all of that, it wasn't all bad, and these posts are supposed to be a celebration of accomplishments and the positives of the year, so let's get into that.

 

My financials are still, in a word, rough. The upside is that - despite the weird backslide that happened, where I'd see more supporters but the actual income would continue to drop - the actual number of people supporting me has continued to rise. It's genuinely awesome to see more people come in, especially since spending all that time developing side content felt a lot like spinning my wheels.

The other side of this, which most of you don't really see, is that I cleared out most of my client work. While it would be easy to view this as a negative because it's income I no longer have, the extra work had become a point of stress, and I feel the best I have since 2025 began having the freedom to work on what I want to work on rather than being blindsided by extra deadlines when I'm already putting myself under pressure to get an update published.

That's not to say all of my client work is gone, though. If you weren't already aware, I'm the writer for Divine Intervention, which also had its very first release into early access just before the end of the year. If this is the first you're hearing about it, you can check that out here. The public release for that prologue is happening soon, so if you want to get your hands on that, you can go join the public Discord.

The itch bundles are struggling compared to where they were last year, but they continue to be a highlight anyway. Just like I'm continuously humbled by anyone at all wanting to support my dream-chasing, it's truly inspiring to see people continue to support these bundles despite the international wave of censorship making it harder and harder for people to find us at all. It's been tough for a lot of developers, and it gives me a lot of sorely needed hope seeing people find their way to us and actively support us anyway.

 

Moving on to development, my plans for Maids & Masters obviously took significantly longer than I wanted them to, but I still managed to get v1.0 out before the end of 2025.

That, more than anything else, feels surreal.

Even if the work isn't quite done on MnM yet - I've already got a fairly lengthy changelog of bugs and other little updates and fixes for v1.0.1 - there were more times than I'd really like where it felt like I'd have to abandon game development entirely before I got this far. The fact that I managed to get to v1.0 at all is still settling into my brain as something that really happened, even though weeks have passed since I pushed the publish buttons.

Precious Kouhai obviously didn't get more than the occasional mention over the course of the year, but I think you're mostly okay with that. It's a practice project, and to that end, I think it's served its purpose well. I still fully intend to complete it, but being a practice project, it was always intended to be short, so I'm expecting it to take two, maybe three updates before it too hits v1.0, and then I'll have two whole games under my belt.

Not counting the games I've worked on for clients that are also finished now, anyway. 

 

Looking toward the rest of 2026, I don't expect it to be any kinder than 2025 was, but I'm excited for it anyway. The poll that will decide what project comes next will be going up on Friday on both Patreon and Subscribestar for paid supporters, which is something I'm anticipating and anxious about in equal measure. There are already a few polls up for everyone that'll factor into that decision for everyone, so if you have opinions about what I should be doing next, go get some reading in and cast some votes and/or leave some comments. I really do want to hear from you.

I am extremely excited for whatever comes next, regardless of where the vote lands. The fact that I managed to get far enough to start on a second major solo project is pretty exciting by itself, but I've also learned a lot, and I've put some work into updating my tools and assets, so if you ignore PK and go straight from MnM to whatever I end up making, you should notice a pretty good jump in fidelity.

It's going to be a bit of a slow start after spending so much time burnt out last year, and I really don't want to repeat that this year. Even by accident, because I've discovered that when I'm excited to work on something, I won't actually stop working on it even if it's a detriment to my health.

 

Between that, and expecting this year won't be any easier than last year was, I think this is about where my attitude is:

 

2026 - have at you.