Greetings Players!

Well, as promised, here comes the new version of Leather & Madness.

As you can see when you start the game, it's version 0.9.9. I know I promised it would be the final version, and in a way, it is. The game is complete and can be played through absolutely all possible paths, reaching the 34 different epilogues that the story offers.

So, why isn't it the final version then?

Well, when I started developing the game, it was meant to be a good way to get into and learn about the world of generative AIs. I wanted to see if I could generate images for the things I wrote. For many years, I've written material for role-playing games, and I thought it could be a good experiment to see how new tools could help create content.

In my case, I'm terrible at creating artistic content, and, since it was a free experiment with no plans to make any money, I couldn't afford to pay artists to develop the graphics. With that in mind, I started creating the first images and learning about this tremendous new world that has opened up before us.

From there, I also became interested in tools that can help correct texts: grammatical errors, repeated words, suggestions... I must say that, although I have used them to correct texts, I have not been entirely convinced of their current state. Most of the time, I ignored the suggestions or didn't like them.

In short, many months after working on this experiment, I finished the last part of the story and the last images. To try to maintain coherence, I continued using the tools I started with. Throughout this time, I have learned a lot about AIs: how to improve prompts, train my own models and checkpoints, maintain character consistency between different images, etc. In short, what I can do now and what I did at the beginning are not comparable.

I thought about using what I learned in a future project. But... seeing the finished game and comparing what was done with what I can do now, it seemed... cheap. That's why, in a fit of madness, I decided to redo absolutely all the graphic components of the game using what I have learned so far. Hence, I have baptized this version as 0.9.9.

In this version, you will already find all the CGs completely revised. We are talking about generating 218 images in total just for the images that you can open in the gallery. You can imagine the amount of time I have invested in remaking the images and then retouching them to my liking. Yes, each one of them ends up being retouched in one way or another.

I was able to redo some of the secondary characters, but not many. The truth is that there is still a lot of work to be done. My intention is to publish soon, I don't know when, the definitive version of the game with all the scenarios and all the characters recreated. I may try to experiment with some more things, but I prefer not to advance them since they are technologies that I am currently learning, and I don't know if I will be able to advance enough to apply them to this game.

In any case, I hope you like the game, and that the end of the story surprises you. The epilogues are short, but they will indicate your level of success. I am left with the desire to make the "perfect endings" longer. In any case, who knows if, for the version I will publish later, I will rewrite them in a more extensive way to better talk about the future of the characters.

As always, I would like you to leave your opinions about the game, especially now that it is "finished," and tell me what things you think could be improved, what things you liked most, and what you liked least.

Finally, I just want to thank those who have supported me throughout this journey and have encouraged me.

Best regards, The Puppydragon