Progress Report #01

💎 Hello, everyone! This is my first Progress Report of many to come. ⭐

First of all, my first few Progress Reports will definitely be open to the public until I feel justified enough to paywall it for pledgers in the future. I gotta make sure they aren't pledging for nothing!

Secondly, I want to thank everyone for taking the time to try out what I've developed so far with STELLA's 0.1 release. I received an amazing amount of feedback, both positive and negative, so I greatly appreciate those of you who shared your thoughts with me. To me, even the negative feedback is extremely helpful because it points out my weaknesses as a new developer. I want to improve in areas that feel lacking to make STELLA a better AVN for everyone. Moreover, constructive criticism will keep me on my toes and prevent any stagnation or plateauing of quality.

With that, I am extremely excited to continue developing STELLA for many years to come. All of the love and support from everyone has been a great motivator. I was pretty anxious and nervous to release my passion project of the last 9 months to the public, so being met with all of these positive opinions have been super reassuring. Thank you. I hope you are all looking forward to more as I continue to develop and share the story (and hot, steamy porn) of STELLA.

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For my next steps, I will soon be releasing a minor update of STELLA 0.1.1 to address some minor issues and additions, like typos, minor dialogue changes, more Lexicon/Dictionary terms, etc. There is nothing worth downloading and replaying for, so please save your time and bandwidth if you've already played the 0.1 update. I just want to release this minor patch to make it an improved experience for people who haven't played yet. I will also create some custom renders for my beloved friends who pledged a higher tier with that benefit during 0.1's development. I would've finished these a lot sooner, but my full-time day job was pretty demanding this month after I released (thank god it didn't delay public release any further). My schedule should be a lot more lax in October, so I can finally start working on STELLA development again.

Speaking of development, it's time to talk about the technical side of 0.2's development. I will be burning my Honey Select 2 Better Repack and starting fresh. Of course, I will be backing up my repack and copy over all the important things like character cards and whatnot to the new repack. I am doing something so demanding because I want to have the latest and greatest with HS2 BR16, Hanmen's Graphics Plugin (v1.2), and Hanmen's Next-Gen Shaders (v4.0). These new upgrades will address a lot of the issues I've had with HS2 Studio, introduce new QOL and helpful features, and ideally improve my renders of STELLA 0.2 and onward. I also need to mess around with Studio to make and tune new graphical presets that will not be too jarring from 0.1's visuals but still improve future updates. I am fully aware of some graphical weaknesses/issues, like character skin being too "washed out," that will hopefully be fixed with these upgrades/revamps. With a fresh repack, I will also be spending a lot of time downloading all the mods from all of my pledged HS2 modders (who deserve all the money in the world for their amazing work and dedication for our community). My poor 2TB SSD will suffer, but it will be worth it in the end once everything is set up.

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Finally, for the juicy part of the Progress Report, I will share my plans for STELLA 0.2. I want to preface this by saying I don't know how long it will take me to release the next update. 0.1 was unfortunately a longer dev cycle of 9 months thanks to the peaks-and-valleys of busyness with my day job and whatnot. I would've loved to finish it a lot sooner, but STELLA is currently a passion project/hobby, so it's hard to find proper time to get some productive work done. However, a lot of 0.1's development effort went into setting up the foundation of the game: the coding, the photocard album, other menus, logistics, etc. With that being solidified, I will have a lot more time to work on the script and renders of 0.2 and onward. In other words, 0.2 will be a LONGER update! I am currently drafting the outline of 0.2's story and will be spending the next week or so fleshing it out to capture all the story beats and stuff I want to include this time around. Fortunately, I will not be running out of ideas for updates any time soon. I have been writing down all of the important things related to STELLA in my own personal Discord server, such as future story events, character dynamics, and sex scenes, positions, and kinks.

Yes, there will be A LOT OF SEX IN STELLA! Don't worry, my fellow degenerates. Even though I want STELLA to be leaning towards a slow-burn, comfy story, that doesn't mean there won't be a shit ton of hot, steamy sex in my ADULT Visual Novel. On that note, I fully intend to make STELLA a meaningful game with girls you will learn more about and love even more. I think deep emotional connections will amplify the porn of the game, and I hope all of you can be patient and look forward to it. If you want a mindless harem fuckfest, you got plenty of other games and stuff for that in the meanwhile. On that note, I want to include at LEAST two H-scenes for STELLA 0.2. I think the toughest part of making a more realistic and enjoyable AVN story is finding a way to incorporate sex scenes that make sense with the plot progress and character dynamics and aren't just thrown into your face with porn logic which requires suspension of disbelief. However, I am confident I can fit at least the two ideas I have in mind, so please look forward to it.

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With that, I am going to wrap up some project work for my day job and then finally start working towards my development of STELLA 0.2. Once again, thank you for all of the love and support from you all. I sincerely appreciate it, and I hope I can continue to deliver an excellent AVN for you all.

Much love,
🐣 eggrik