Dev Log Ep3 Week 4: You Make the Dev Very Nervous

TLDR: I did stuff and things.

Honestly, I do not even know where to start this week. We have a fair bit of ground to cover, so if you want to grab a fresh cup of coffee before we begin, go for it. Do not worry, I'll wait.
Alright, now that everyone who was only going to read the first line has left, let us get into it.

First, let’s talk about how I started the week. I was still going back and forth on Blender vs DAZ for animations. DAZ has the benefit of retaining the exact look of the stills, but it takes forever to render each frame. We are talking three to five minutes per frame with denoise, which adds up fast when you have over 144 frames for even a short animation. It gets much worse on longer animations, and the denoise step removes a lot of visual consistency anyway.

On top of that, DAZ makes it very difficult to preview animations properly. Playback drops so many frames that I cannot really see what I am doing. The rigs also lack proper IK and FK, so if I want a character to crouch or shift weight naturally, I have to manually keyframe each bone or rely on plugins in creative ways to work around it.

Blender, on the other hand, lets me render a frame in under a minute. I can preview animations in real time, and I have full IK and FK control. The downside is that importing characters can be tricky, matching skin shaders takes work, and lighting that matches DAZ can be difficult. In the end, I decided to accept that there may be small visual inconsistencies and do my best to keep them subtle. The long term benefit is more animations, better sex animations, and far more creative freedom. The menu animation from Episode Two and the Akari scenes were already done in Blender, and continuing down this path should ultimately raise the overall quality of the game.

Blah Blah animation talk. What else have I been up to?

Still loosely on the animation topic, but worth mentioning. A friend of mine, Classy Lemon, is the madman behind Projekt: Passion. If you have not heard of it, I am honestly stunned. He has been doing cinematic cutscenes with voice acting since I was still being a bum and playing Elden Ring. Watching his work made me realize I need to step my game up.

So yes, I hired voice actors. Akari and Zoe will have voices, and the MC will as well. We are getting cinematic cutscenes in Episode 3. I am extremely excited about this, even though I know the workload is going to be wild. I want to keep pushing the quality of the storytelling, and this felt like the right next step.

Other characters will also get voice work and sex sounds as development continues.

Stats for this week:
70 still renders
1 animation
1 new environment built
Several new 3D assets to keep the Moonlight world feeling unique

As always, I will keep working like a man possessed to keep things moving forward.

I appreciate all of you. Thank you for the continued support.

Cheers,
Bat