V 0.4 final report (Warning, wall of text here)...

Hey thereee...

Here it is, finally, the last report before the launch...

I've added some images because, well, sometimes images are worth more than a thousand words... although I might still end up writing way more than a thousand words anyway...

I still need to render a few things, but those will be ready by early morning... Worst case scenario (power outage or something), I still have all of Sunday. Everything related to "variables" is ready... and I have something important to share about this.

It’s not mandatory, but I recommend replaying, at least from the point where you choose between the four girls, right before MC passes out.

 As you know, this is constantly evolving, and I’ve added an extra variable that wasn’t there before, directly tied to the choice at that point. The game will work regardless, but this new variable influences some variations in later dialogues and a small extra scene with Asami (if you picked her). Specifically, if you chose Asami and don’t replay that part, the game might act weird in the future... The choice of Asami triggers a behavioral shift in MC (managed by another variable) that won’t be accounted for if you don’t replay. It doesn’t matter much now, but down the line, the additions and subtractions to MC’s behavioral variable will play a bigger role.

I know it can be annoying, but hey, this is RenPy... All you need to do is go to Preferences and click on "Skip Unseen Text". Then, if you start over from scratch, holding down the 'Ctrl' key, you’ll be back at the four-girl choice screen in under five minutes.

Back to the images... The first one is a snippet of code where some images are defined. The videos themselves, along with the first and last frame of each video, are transformed into something I can call whatever I like. Later, at the appropriate moment, with a single keyword (which I’m defining here), I can call all the images and the video to behave as a single entity. As you can see, there are eight videos. That’s what I’ve been working on, and there’s still a little bit left to finish... All that stuff that might seem weird is what needs to be used to ensure smooth transitions between images and videos.

The second image is closely related to the MC’s behavioral change. What you see highlighted is the change in the behavioral variable at the moment you decide to pressure poor Megan (version 0.3).
You can see the same thing in the next image after choosing Asami, just before the blackout. That wasn’t there before, and it’s going to be important later on...

The last image is part of the summary generated by the Ren'Py SDK... 44,652 words in total (for the whole game), and I’m not done yet. Remember, there are several changes in the prologue dialogues. I’ve reviewed the translations more thoroughly (I’m a Spanish speaker), and now the prologue dialogues should sound more natural to an English-speaking person. As a result, some things have been shortened, while others have been expanded.

One of the things I’ve shortened is my image report. From now on, I’ll only report the total number of images that aren’t part of a video. At the moment, there are 697 images and eight animations (videos). It doesn’t matter anymore if a single video was made up of 300 images. For the final report, I’ll only count images and videos.

Please, keep something else in mind. The animations and videos are not perfect. That said, I insist they are of much higher quality than some videos I’ve seen in other AVNs I’ve played, even from supposedly "more experienced" developers. Being completely honest, I don’t like them, and as soon as I get the chance to redo them, I will. Some sharp-eyed players will notice they’re quite grainy. This isn’t an issue with the video encoding process (converting the image sequence into video) or the method used to further compress their size. It’s entirely due to the rendering.

To make a normal image in the game look good, I’m using a minimum of 330 iterations (sometimes even more than 1000). This reduces the "noise" in the image with each iteration and eliminates the light specks (commonly referred to as "fireflies"). But for many of the images in the animations, I had to lower it to 220 or even 200 iterations simply because my current hardware can’t handle more. So, one of the first things I’ll do when I upgrade my graphics card is re-render all the animations. Some of the animations themselves will also be redone, as a few don’t look as smooth as they should due to another issue also tied to limited resources.

I’ve never played around with the animation curves where you can add final fine-tuning. I’ve never done it because it requires a lot of testing, and I can’t test an animation easily. Only once did I do a preliminary test of an animation before deciding to fully render it. The test involved rendering it in low quality, converting the images into a video, and seeing what happened. In that case, I rendered 40 images with 5 iterations each... and it took me almost One hour. All of that just to render it properly afterward, only to end up scrapping the video because it was one of the first ones I made and didn’t fit the later idea I had... lol.

And to wrap this up, why did I have to write so much? Because I plan to keep Monday’s post clean, with just the download links and the changelog. Anything that needed to be communicated had to be done beforehand.

Alright, I hope I won’t bother you again soon with another wall of text.

See you Monday.

Postscript: Shortly after releasing the update, I’ll give you a little help if you want to see the MC’s death and haven’t managed to trigger it yet. As you know, even if you want to see it, it might not happen. It’s something simple that’s within the code, and if you’re impatient and know a bit about Ren’Py and Python, it should be relatively easy to find. But be patient; on Thursday, in the weekly report, I’ll provide step-by-step instructions.

💖