Pics 91: A new female "avatar"

By the time this scheduled post goes live, version 0.5 of Something's In The Air Redux will be out and available to Dater level patrons and higher.

The main thing about this beta release is that all the old pictures that are set to be part of the Redux game have been fully updated.  The last batch of pictures were the various scenes set in the fictional MMORPG Elemental Realms.

I really wanted these pictures to look different from the rest of the game and experimented with several ideas like outline renders, flatter "cell" renders, or anime looking avatars.  Ultimately I went with the fastest and easiest route: Just use the old raytracing renderer on the old files.

The result is that these scenes look more like the original SITA than any other part of the game, but I did not completely avoid updating: They are rendered in 1920x1080 instead of just simple upscaling, and I changed the lighting in several places to get rid of hard shadows.

I also added a female version of the player avatar.

Basically you can choose which avatar to use, the male Ranger or the female Thief.  Both use bows.  Rangers use swords and throw dirt to blind, Thieves use daggers and stealth. You do not have to use the same gender as your player character. I added this choice to the "Character" screen, but it will also ask when you reach a scene set in the video game world.

Most of these scenes happen on the Paula path, but at least one Rachel path does too.

The only other major change to these scenes is that the raptor enemies have changed from green to their default light brown color. This makes the hidden picture puzzle a lot easier, in fact I had to make the jungle brush a little thicker so it is not a complete joke of a puzzle. 

Already started working on 0.6, which has a new ending I haven't completely written yet, and replaces the old epilogues with Rachel Meets Ariane.