DevLog: Discord Server is Here! + More Willow Sneak Peeks Inside!

Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board.

Discord Server is Available!

After reaching a huge milestone in the progress of Chapter 1 (keep on reading!), I'm excited to finally announce that the Discord for Echoes of The Cataclysm is available!
Join us to connect with other developers and fellow fans and get more updates about the project!
Please visit the About page for the Discord link.

🛠️ Current Development

What I'm working on right now:

• Fixed Anya's way too pale skin - looked like a ghost standing next to any other character 👻

• Scene 6 (scroll down for a sneak peek with Willow)

  • 🎉Part 1 (Finished) - Takes place in the entrance of The PRISM facility, and introduces a new character: Willow

    • Posed 66 images (3 characters)

    • Camera positioning, focal length, and DOF

    • Lighting

  • 🎉Part 2 (Finished) - A flashback to Scene 1, introduces new dialogue

    • Posed 4 images (3 characters)

    • Camera positioning, focal length, and DOF

    • Lighting

  • 🎉Part 3 (Finished) - Continuation of the end of Part 1

    • Posed 10 images (3 characters)

    • Camera positioning, focal length, and DOF

    • Lighting

  • 🎶Music + 🔊Sound Design (In Progress)

    • There are three parts (see above) to this scene, with approximately 4 "moods" for which I'll create soundtracks.

    • I'll be starting music production likely after next DevLog.

• 🧹Housekeeping

  • Discord channels and roles + connections to Patreon

  • DevLogs will now only be available on Patreon to consolidate workflow and focus on community building (no longer on Itch.io)

• 💅Polishing

  • Writing - removing non-essentials, fixing inconsistencies, and streamlining the story to provide a more well-rounded experience

• Blender Workflow

  • Click the link above, seriously, it's very interesting! (There's also information down below, in the Technical Corner) If I can streamline this workflow, render quality will jump substantially. This would allow for the memory limitation (that exists on any 3d rendering engine) to be increased, if not lifted. Complex scenes would be able to be split up into bite-sized chunks and rendered piecemeal and then stitched together. It also would mean much more headroom for larger (and higher quality) textures. This could be huge, if I can accomplish it. That's why I might be spending a lot of time researching and crafting a workflow that can break a lot of the limitations.

🔮 Coming Soon

What I'm planning to work on next:

• Adding a "Gallery" to the menu

• Exclusive and available for a limited time Patreon and SubscribeStar "Foundation" tiers are coming!

⚙️ Technical Corner

This isn't exactly technical - more of a self-acknowledgement of progress. I just finished posing, camera positioning, lighting, and rendering of Scene 6, and found myself playing through everything from Scene 1 through Scene 6.
It's incredible to see how each scene shows progression in skills and worldbuilding. Although it'll be a short playthrough (~45mins), I'm excited for everyone to experience the work from start to finish.

And once again, thank you everyone for your love and support - it truly has helped during this journey ❤️

Onto the more actually technical stuff...

As you might've seen above, (Blender Workflow), I'm researching how Blender (and EEVEE) might be able to handle View Layers and how this world can benefit from them. To give a little more insight, currently I'm battling VRAM and RAM limitations; this is due to the complex scene plus the characters in the scene. For context, the particular scene that brought this up was Scene 6: three characters within the entrance of The PRISM facility. Rendering times spiked because the VRAM limit was met, which means borrowing memory from the RAM, and even the RAM limit was met, which meant it was paging onto the SSD. In addition to the increase in render times, machine instability also became an issue, mainly because the RAM was absolutely maxed out; Bluescreen of Death also reared its stupid little head a few times because of this. Needless to say, this forced my attention, and thus, "View Layers" are the target. View Layers (in Blender) are just a way of splitting up the scene when rendering. For example, you could have all characters on one View Layer, and then all environment on another View Layer. One View Layer is rendered at a time, which means only those items are loaded into memory. Then the problem changes from, "How can I fit all of these characters PLUS the environment onto ___ amount of VRAM/RAM?", to "How do I stitch all of these rendered pieces together into one combined image?"
That last question is where I'm at; and if I can successfully accomplish this, and do it properly, I'll hit the render button, Blender will automatically render each View Layer separately, Blender would automatically take each image and stitch them all together, and I'll have an extremely high-quality final render within a matter of minutes.

Obviously, I'll be doing many many tests with View Layers, and if I'm successful, you'll absolutely see it in the next DevLog! (Wish me luck!)

👀 Sneak Peek

A new Willow Sneak Peek (almost straight from the scene).

Willow from last week's Sneak Peek

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️