LR2 Update - Live2D Woes and Delays

Hey, I'm finally here to give you an update on what's been going on with LR2 and my work on it's Live2D update! This progress recap is a little later than I had been planning - about three weeks, actually - because I've been slamming my head against a whole bunch of development issues without making much progress. There have been two main categories of problems, so let's go through them:

First, there are the purely technical issues. When I started this I did some proof-of-concept demos to make sure all of the basic functionality I needed was possible, and it seemed like it all was. Unfortunately, a lot of those features seem to be scaling up poorly when I try to use them for the entirety of Lab Rats 2. Making Live2D models is proving to be a much more time consuming process than I had anticipated. Rendering out clothing items, clothing patterns, makeup, etc. seems like they will be a highly manual (read: time consuming, mistake prone, tedious) task. One of the major reasons I wanted to transition to a new rendering approach was to make adding clothing items easier, and it seems like the new system is failing at that.

Second, I'm unhappy with the actual quality of character art I'm ending up with. The new body options give a much wider range of possible character shapes, but most of them end up looking bad. For a porn game this is obviously not a good thing. Achieving good looking skin tones that can be dynamically recoloured is also something I have been struggling with - my results so far look very plastic-y. 

It's not all bad news; I finally have a mostly-functional demo of the game that I am going to be releasing to patrons in two days (48 hours from this post; I seem to need hard deadlines to get anything done these days). This version strips away all of the old display images, replacing them with one character pose (a default standing pose). This demo leaves out a whole bunch of "nice to have" features, like having clothing fade out when it's removed. It also lacks clothing patterns and does recolouring of jewelry/accessories incorrectly due to some technical limitations.

I'm hoping this demo will give me give me some good feedback on what people consider critical to the LR2 experience. I'm also going to try and gather some technical advice from the modding community, which might let me finally implement some core features I haven't figured out.

Thank you all for hanging out through this, it's been a frustrating few months for me, and I'm sure it has been for you too! If you're a patron check back in two days for the Live2D demo, I'm going to get back to bug hunting to try and make it as stable as I can manage!