Development update #1 - Chapter 3

Hi!

So, as you know, this week marked the start of Chapter 3 development.

And I gotta say... this week was really freaking good.

My previous weekly record during Chapter 2 development, from Monday to Saturday, was 68 renders I think. This week I managed to hit 119 renders in just one week! all of them in 4K.

It may not sound like a lot if you compare it to some other devs out there, but for me this is good.

This came mostly from a boost of motivation. Chapter 2 being well received definitely helped, and my new hardware setup is also making a big difference. My new computer is allowing me to create scenes that I couldn't do before, different camera angles, more characters in the same scene, just more complex stuff overall.

Before, I was constantly worrying about optimization. 99% of the time I had to render characters separately, which often caused lighting mismatches between the characters and the scene. It was messy and pretty limiting.

Now I can actually build scenes the way I imagine them without constantly worrying about hardware limitations.

I'm still missing a bit more rendering speed, and I'll probably run into VRAM issues later when more characters join the story, but so far everything is working really well.

I even purposely tested some very heavy scenes with vegetation, multiple characters, and basically no optimization at all, and they rendered without problems. So I'm really happy about that.

The Blender viewport is the only thing slowing me down a little right now because my CPU isn't top-tier. Posing characters and navigating big scenes can get a bit laggy sometimes, so upgrading the CPU will probably be my next goal, hopefully before Chapter 4 development.

That said, I don't expect to hit 119 renders every week. This week was definitely a motivation boost. I still need to work on the script a bit more, and my irl job will start taking a lot of my time too. But I'll keep doing my best to make as much progress as I can every week.

Besides the renders, I also spent some time improving the character skin shaders. I think I've finally reached a look that I'm really happy with. The skin now looks much more balanced overall, which should hopefully reduce the need for heavy color correction later.

For Chapter 2, I spent about a week and a half color correcting every single render, it was extremely painful. That mainly happened because Chapters 1 and 2 were created on a very cheap monitor that boosted colors in unrealistic ways, so I was never really seeing the true colors of the images.

Now I've upgraded to a monitor with better color accuracy, and I'm also testing renders on other screens too: my old monitor (the one used for Chapters 1 and 2), my laptop screen, my phone, and a tablet a friend gave me.

So if a render looks good on both, my old oversaturated monitor and my very flat laptop screen, chances are it will look good across most displays.

**

Another thing, this week I also worked on doing some fixes here and there for Chapter 2, so it's recommended to download the latest version here. No need to replay anything since nothing important was changed.

I still need to do one more important update for Chapter 2. It will include a few extra fixes to two instrumental songs that currently cut too abruptly without a proper fade-out.

I will also add the end screen, which shows the choices you made at the end of the chapter. It's something important that I completely forgot during development, I honestly have no idea why I forgot to add it. I'll probably work on it today.

And that's everything I think, this week was a strong start for Chapter 3.

Hope you all have a great week!

—pixelend 🧟