🎬 Postmortem: Secrets of Focus – Chapter 2

When I started Secrets of Focus, I thought it would be fun learning something new. I've been experimenting with Stable Diffusion for about 6 months. I had to learn Ren'Py, although that is actually fairly easy to use, also for a newbie.

✍️ Writing

Before I started, I had a basic idea of how the story should go and what the idea was behind the "big mystery" in the game. Developing the characters came quite easy, I did do my best to make each one stand out and not make them too similar. Or too much of a stereotype.

Now that the different branches started in Chapter 2, writing took more time than I expected. But overall I'm quite happy with the progress and how the story is evolving.

I did decide to limit the number of Love Interests a bit, there are now four of them. Three others characters will have some "fun" scenes, but those will not branch out romantically. I'm worried that with more LI's, writing will become more difficult for a newbie like myself.

Ember’s quiet strength became more fragile.

🎨 Art and atmosphere

Visually, I already learned a lot while working on Chapter 2. I decided to revisit some earlier art from Chapter 1 and redo them. I still suck at inpainting, so the Stable Diffusion work is sometimes just a lot of retries, or using Photoshop generative fill/remove to help me out sometimes. Not all backgrounds are always the same, hopefully something I will learn in the upcoming Chapter(s).

I worked with ChatGPT to help me develop a Ren'Py script for blinking eyes. It took a lot of testing and recoding, but it ultimately worked. With two different images (one with eyes open and one with eyes closed) the code will make the images transition quickly, so it looks the character is blinking. It even has a possibility percentage to double blink, making it more realistic.

💻 Technical chaos (a polite term for learning)

Things I still need to improve or learn:

• An Android port
• Animations (should be possible with WAN)
• Inpainting so characters can be placed in a background and lighting is improved
• An in-game phone with messaging and images
• Consistent tattoos