Posted August 29, 2026 by Khronarch
#devlog
Hello!
Hope you've all been well! We hit double digit Dev Logs?! That's crazy. There are lots of topics to talk about, so let's jump into things.
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I'm going to move Dev Logs to a monthly schedule for the time being. The reason for this is that I always get anxious about wanting to show progress in these posts and currently I don't feel I could show enough every 2 weeks, sorry about that. I'll see how things change in my personal life and if I can go back to bi-weekly posts or not. I probably should've done this earlier (like the last Dev Log), but I thought about it for longer instead.
This means that Dev Log #11 will be a month from now.
FYI , this is also why I didn't post Dev Log #9 here on itch.
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We're up to 350 renders and 2 animations.
I've been doing a bit practicing for animating bodies to prepare for that lewd scene in the Prologue - which I'd love to make into something I can be proud of. I still need to improve a lot but it's a really exciting experience overall.
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I've been rather worried about the fact that I can't seem to gauge the pacing or size of certain scenes and that caused me a lot of headaches.
Because of this, I came up with the idea to put together everything in ren'py every 5 scenes which I render out. This would mean putting it all together via code, adding audio, transitions etc. This way I can go through them in full and see what kind of experience you all will have, helping me understand better where I need to improve things.
So, to prepare for this, I've started doing some coding, organizing stuff and testing with Scene#1 how I would put everything together. Coding is challenging part for me in this entire project and I know I'd lose my mind if I had to do all of it at the very end of the dev cycle, it being the last thing before release/testing - because of this I really believe doing it in segments will be helpful for me.
Additionally, perhaps it can also serve as a small milestone where I can feel proud of what I have so far? I don't know... just also trying to come up with things to tackle my impostor syndrome.
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Lore, narrative and universe design
This is actually where a considerable amount of my time went recently. I'm never happy with what I create and also being a very visual person, my renders have been eating at my mind. I felt it was needed, but also some fellow developer friends have recommended just taking a break. However, I'd feel weird and empty not doing anything related to Aether during a day (or multiple). So, instead I did a test where I told myself that I'm not allowed to open the studio at all. Instead, I opened up my notes and thought - if I can do some narrative or universe design or write the script, that's great, if not, then I'm allowing my brain to rest.
I didn't rest much, partially perhaps because I enjoyed going back to this workflow so much that the initial 1 day test turned into more and I'll probably implement it into my schedule, hoping that long-term this will help out with progress.
Universe design, which I essentially consider to be the history of the world, working out the underlying logic of how the world works, the ontology and metaphysical aspects etc., is something that's become one of my favorite aspects of writing.
Considering I'm building a very lore-heavy and dense universe, there's a lot of work to be done in this realm. My general attitude with things is that if a question should arise in the mind of a reader while experiencing the story, then there should be an answer - yes, this is nearly impossible, but just attempting this will pay off. There are loads of things in my universe that have gone through significant changes, as over the past year or so I've added more and more detail to everything. And slowly but surely I'm tackling the few outlined main/most important lore points which I still have to address in detail, ideally before Chapter 1/2 (although there are elements that would need some work for the Prologue as well).
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In light of hitting double digits in Dev Logs, I thought to go down memory lane for a bit.
I've already done a bit of a teaser with Sofia and Leila in the past as tier benefits, but I realized I'm too passionate about development itself to not want to share stuff like this with everyone. I'll show some side-by-sides of the main girls today (always on the left) vs their first ever version that I created (always on the right).
I went into designing my characters with a simple intent - if I felt they fit the role and the personality I had in mind for them while I also found them attractive (duh, right?), then I was on the right path. With each main girl, both with appearance and personality/behavior, I intend to elicit specific emotions from the readers. I spent crazy amounts of time fine-tuning them and therefore staring at them, and I never thought I'd say this but I'm actually mostly happy with how the main girls turned out... there are some exceptions, like hairs not being perfect and-... you know what, I said mostly for a reason.
As I started learning more and more about character designs - especially in the last few months - I always went back and tuned all the girls while ensuring that they stayed true to the design that I unveiled them with.
Note: all the older versions have messed up eyes because they used older shaders; I didn't want to change them as it would make their eyes look basically the same as today, and actually every single one of them had vastly different looking eyes back in the day.
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Ayame was the 6th out of the 7 main girls to be created. She had a preliminary design back in August 2025 which I didn't touch for months, both for being unsure about how to make her look good, but also because I was doing other stuff too. Her character almost didn't make it in, as originally Ella was supposed to be the "goth girl" in Aether. However, after I decided against that, Ayame got the go ahead. The single most frustrating and challenging aspect of her design was her tattoos. Partially because I had no clue how to even approach things, as I didn't want to use an existing overlay without modifying it, and also because I had to work in photoshop (I have an unhealthy love-hate relationship with that software).
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Ella was originally not planned to exist, I intended Maria to have only two daughters and therefore she was made as 5th out of the 7 main girls (although I had an attempt at a girl whose concept got scrapped and I had a fairly-close-to-final version of a main girl who also got cut).
She, as mentioned before, was originally meant to be a rather textbook archetype character. I original wrote her to be standoffish, difficult to get along with while she was a full-on rebel. While her rebellious nature somewhat stuck with her with a twist, I tuned her behavior a lot as well (her loyalty and even obsession with her sisters and her family as a whole). While she is very much capable of being standoffish with people, thanks to her strong will and ability to stay true to what she believes in, my original idea of her being the tsundere, whom Hector would need to conquer, is gone (I suppose that role somewhat shifted towards Reina).
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And here comes the very first of the main girls whom I created. Her base design was nailed down at the very start, but I do believe that all the changes are also fairly easy to see. Leila (along with Sofia) were the two designs I originally created back in 2024 when I was working on something that eventually turned into Aether through some massive changes. Leila was my 2nd (or 3rd) design ever in HS2, perhaps it's that nostalgia or something else that influenced me to not rework her completely, even after I started noticing so many problems and imperfections about her design. Instead I kept iterating, going back and updating whenever I learned something new about character designs, fine-tuning her into how she looks today.
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Maria was the 3rd of the 7 main girls, and quite honestly, I didn't remember that she was so close to her current design, at least looking at this render. I've made lots of smaller changes to her face and her body too, but it seems like at first glance they're difficult to spot. Maria's role in the story is a very peculiar one, some people have already pointed it out correctly in the Discord server, so writing her is a challenge. I have a plan in mind for her, and truthfully, the reason why she was included as a main girl in the first place was for the mature women lovers.
There's even a chance that she'll go through a bit of a change throughout the story, where she'd thin down a little as she's a tiny bit more on the chubbier side (in a way). This is undecided though, I'll eagerly listen to feedback regarding this and see what's the consensus.
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Reina is the last of the main girls who got created and I actually rushed her design by the end. I couldn't really decide who I wanted to make her into, so she had 3 different iterations where she was vastly different characters - busty and tall, very lean model-like, super fit and athletic. Her initial designs were made just after Ayame, however she went through a complete redesign later.
In February 2026 I went back to the drawing board and redesigned her from scratch. I ended up having to rush finishing her design right before the official character introductions and I was super uncertain about how she turned out. I genuinely believed she was my weakest design.
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And lastly the girl who changed the most form her inception - yep, Sofia's very different. Her direction was something that I couldn't capture for a really long time. She went through 2 major reworks to arrive roughly at the place where she is today (and even after that she probably received the most amount of smaller adjustments). Sofia, being from the original story that I was creating back in 2024, had a different role in the story and her personality wasn't nearly as refined as today.
Back then I got overexcited about rendering and jumped straight in. I already had 100 and something renders done, all of which obviously got scrapped... gods they look bad. Perhaps in the future I'll show a couple of them.
Even since I've shown off the girls back in April (or May?), I've been making small changes to them, constantly improving them as I get better at character designs myself. Ideally, I don't want my earlier designs (especially main girls) to play catch-up with newly designed side girls for instance.
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So that was yap festival #10. I kinda ran out of juice by end.
Honestly, looking at all the girls, perhaps this last section wasn't as interesting as I initially thought. I feel it's only Reina and Sofia who changed considerably. It is what it is, thank you for reading if you were interested!
Thank you to every single of one of you for your continuous support, your interest, engaging with anything related to Aether, and most importantly, thank you for believing in me and this fictional universe I'm creating.
Wish you all a good weekend!
-Khronarch