Update development status #5.

Hello everyone.

In this post, I'll try to tell you in detail about everything I'm currently working on. For those who don't like reading long texts — 316 images, 5 new music tracks, 7 new sounds.

For those who enjoy reading developers' ramblings — make yourselves comfortable.

As I said above, we currently have 316 images. They are fully processed and integrated into the game. Let me try to explain why there are relatively few of them over this period of time. Let me start by saying that I'm not a programmer. And to be honest, the game's code is as messy as it could possibly be. While replaying the game over and over, I noticed that some things didn't work as they should. The funny thing is that such things are often not noticed right away — or even after release. Since no one mentioned them, I assume either nobody noticed, or they just didn't say anything — and I'm not going to describe what was found. The game works 90% as intended and is fine. But there were still some inconsistencies, and I needed time to fix them. At the same time, I prepared a foundation in the code for further development of the episode, so that every scene would work exactly as I want it to. And there will be less junk in it, which should save time on fixes and so on.

Some time ago, I ran into my PC acting suspiciously strange. Sometimes it would just shut down at random moments, even though temperatures and other readings were normal. Out of fear of losing all development data — from Daz itself, its libraries and assets, all the way to dialogues, music, and code — I tried to carefully find the problem without breaking anything, and... I have no idea what it was, it just disappeared on its own.

Anyway, I hope everything is fine now. Let's move on to the most fucked-up thing there is — DAZ Studio. Imagine this: you sit for a couple of hours in this wonderful program, tweaking all sorts of things for a scene, looking at naked pixel girls in 4K, and everything seems fine. You turn on the render preview, everything looks as it should, you admire it, rejoice, contemplate... You save scene after scene, catch a great vibe and just float along the river of bliss from what you're doing. And so hours fly by unnoticed... dozens of hours. And when this routine starts to get boring, you tell yourself: "Bro, it's time to render all this." You wake up, get ready for work in the morning, and start the render queue so that while you're working, your PC is working too — because you can't be idle. After 8-10 hours you come back from work, hoping to take a look at what your computer has crafted in your absence, AND YOU SEE AN ERROR, CARL!

The funniest part is that you have no idea what this error is, because the highly esteemed DAZ Studio thinks so highly of itself that it considers you a Microsoft developer who 100% understands how any software works, and you definitely don't need to KNOW THE PROBLEM DESCRIPTION, BECAUSE YOU'RE SO SMART ANYWAY. So basically, the scene goes to the trash, along with all the content that was created for it over hours. To avoid this kind of bullshit in the future, I now create a test render. You ask what that is? You will ask, right?... Anyway, after setting up and building the entire scene, I now do one render in it. Right away. And now I have to do this after every major change in the scene (adding a character, changing lighting). I can spend about an hour setting up a scene, render it for about 30 minutes as a test render, add a character, set up lighting for them, dress them, choose a pose, adjust the camera, and DO A TEST RENDER. The plus side is that I'll have to render less in the queue, but the downside is that you lose the vibe. It's a real pain. You're all fired up and working on posing, you start the render, lie down on the couch and scroll through your ex's Instagram — and that's it, the pumped-up mood for work is gone.

Alright, these are all just common difficulties, and they don't actually happen that often. I think a way to fix all this will be found soon. Moving on.

As some of you know, I don't receive any money from game development — not a single penny. It's all because of sanctions and other crap, so everything the game needs financially comes out of my own pocket. I haven't talked about this publicly, and I generally think such things shouldn't be made public, as they're my personal problems. There is income on Patreon, but it stays there indefinitely. In principle, the game doesn't require any astronomical sums for development — what really needs money is the PC. And lately, components are really expensive — well, they're not worth the money they're asking for. There was a recent situation: I needed to download something very large, but there was no space left on the PC, and I really didn't want to download it to the system drive. I downloaded it to the drive with the DAZ library, and only 215 MB of free space remained there, and possibly because of this, DAZ was simply loading scenes and the library incredibly slowly. In other words — it was impossible to work. Then I deleted those files and voilà, everything seemed fine again. But the library is still growing, which means I need to buy a new SSD, and a good new drive costs over 10k. I'm leading to the point that delays happen for various reasons, and not always because of the software side.

Once I said that the first game was abandoned because it was too ambitious for a first project. There were many planned interweavings, callbacks, twists, turns, flips, two backflips and so on. Now I look at Betrayal and realize it looks even more ambitious. We have a slow start, which will be spiced up in this update with a bunch of events and answers to some questions that will generate new ones. In this episode, I want to try to implement what I failed to do in TSOB — variability. If, together with all the ideas, I manage to achieve what I want — and I will, 100% — then I will be able to surpass myself. That will be a huge achievement for me.

I also want to talk about the game's subject matter. This block is for those who PM me on Discord complaining about the lack of porn.

Let me start by saying that I've never presented myself as someone who suffers from a tumor in his balls and solves this problem through pixel boobs. 18+ scenes in the game are not porn for the sake of porn — they are a tool that adds depth to the characters and their story. The primary goal is to show how the characters interact with each other and where YOUR choices lead. I know that the audience of such games is only interested in them for these kinds of scenes, but the only thing I can do for you right now is either forget about my game, or look at it from a different angle. Don't forget that it's still in development and much more lies ahead.

Anyway, I got a bit preachy at the end, so it's time to wrap up this post.

Recently I wrote that I'd tell the story of how the characters were created. I'll create a poll on Discord, and you'll decide which character the next post will be about.

That's all for today. Summer is coming to an end, which means it's almost time for cozy evenings with a cup of tea or coffee. A couple of previews will be below.

As always — hugs to everyone, lifted you up.