Dev Log Week 26: If You Ain’t First, You’re Last

I’ll try to keep this brief, but a lot happened this week.

Writing:

I finished the script for this episode, which gives me a clear picture of just how much work is left. That alone would have been a solid milestone, but this week had even more in store.

Bugs:

For months, I’ve been dealing with a Daz bug that was destroying my productivity. Every time I saved a scene, it took up to 4 minutes. Since I save frequently, you can imagine how much time this ate up. I was ready to throw money at new hardware, convinced that was the issue.

Thankfully, Tako convinced me to dig deeper, and I found the real culprits. First, my NAS and PC weren’t using SMB, which slowed things down. The bigger problem was Daz creating duplicate metadata every time I saved within its folder structure. By saving scenes to an unmapped folder, I cut the save time down to about 20 seconds. With that roadblock gone, I was set for a very productive week.

Environments:

I had to kitbash 4 environments this week. Luckily, I had all the assets I needed, so it wasn’t too much of a time sink.

Renders:

This is where things got fun. Volos, the dev behind Demon Seed, is now fully hooked on our Bum Dev competitions, so he insisted we run another one this weekend. Classy Lemon and TakoYuh joined in, which set us up for a fantastic day of spite-fueled productivity.

The only downside was Maya being on holiday (how dare he). Without Maya, Tako just doesn’t have the spite he needs to pump out big numbers. Sometimes you need a nemesis to be excellent. Fortunately for me, I am my own nemesis, and I managed to smash out 123 renders, securing first place and making an already productive week even better.

I finished the week with 189 renders total, bringing the episode count to 2,055.

What’s Next:

I think I’ve got around 200 renders left, plus a handful I want to redo because they didn’t come out quite right. Could be low iterations, could be lighting issues, but thankfully, it’s not too many.

Once those are finished, I’ll tidy up any renders I’m unhappy with in post, apply my colour grade to give the game that cinematic look, then move on to creating the music and wrapping up the last bits of coding. There’s still a fair chunk of work ahead, but it feels really good to be at this stage.

That’s enough yapping for now. Have a great week.

Cheers,
Bat