I've come to the decision that I will be discontinuing the Dark Lady 18+ Pinup Pack DLC on April 30th. This is mainly so the entire Deluxe Edition can be bought without needing to disable the explicit content filter and the entire game as available sans that DLC, which adds zero gameplay. The DLC itself was only ever intended as a bonus for early purchasers. I will not be reducing the price of the DLC however, as I don't intend to cater to the discontinued games community again. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from last time… mostly out of guilt.
And I'll be blunt, I only did it because I accidentally created a DLC package in the Steam backend and didn't know how to undo it. In the end, I took a bunch of AI art I made for personal use with Novel AI's top level plan, so I had commercial rights.
In addition, I've since realised that AI art is a very touchy subject in the artist community, and thus will be removing it from sale. It's unfair that artists can have their work used to train these AI models unwillingly, and I'd like to see some proper AI regulation around both art and text models, but this is not a post about tech regulation.
I will still use AI art tools for personal use, as I have a local installation of Stable Diffusion right now, but I won't commercialise any AI content until a reasonable solution has been found for these issues.
Also, as an aside, any work on the game may be even further hampered as I've ended up getting a job as a volunteer Communications Officer at a local LGBT-focussed community legal service. The reputation factors of such a job are another reason why I am taking the DLC down, but at this point… it's mainly to cover my own butt in case of other bad events.
I've turned this discontinuation notice into another blog like post, but I feel that it's important to connect with owners of the game to make sure I'm not dead. Still, I don't think Game 2 will get off the ground if this job works out.
I am also aware that the website is currently unavailable. This is intentional. We currently have no website. The domain name still functions, and my email is still functional, despite a change of host.
I did also have hernia surgery about three weeks ago, and I still can't lift heavy objects for the next three either, so I'm having to get extra help around the house from my nationalised disability insurance.
That's it for now. I'm still going to compile the stuff for the next patch, obviously. The goal for the 1.3 patch is to have it out for the Spring sale.