PROGRESS REPORT #147

Hello everyone, welcome to the 147th progress report!

Small announcement

First off, since I'll be mentionning it later in the progress section, here's a small but still kinda cool announcement. My itch.io page was reinstated! This happened after a couple of months of back-and-forth over e-mail... The wheels of itch.io bureaucracy turn slowly.

I took the occasion to give it a professional look with my UI guy. Here's a link, if you're curious: https://misarmor.itch.io/a-home-in-the-desert

The progress

So the previous dev cycle was another one of those (again, still very formative) torture circle of relentless ballbusting of the well-meaning but reasonably clueless game dev Misarmor.

Starting with that new image that I'm sure nobody has missed from the new itch.io page background. (Please check it on itch, I can't publish it here in this public post)

I allowed myself to make a whole new render for the page because like all the other images in the new BG, it will also be used in the main game. Note that it's still missing an element, but it's okay, it would be even more spoilery with it anyway.

Anyway, point is, how much time do you think this image took to make? 1 hour? 2 hours? Think again, it took me almost 3 days.

The number one culprit may not be the one you think: it's the panties. Having Emily hold those panties was a challenge I thought I fully mastered, but boy was I wrong. Basically, those panties have 3 materials: one for the main fabric, one for the top (gray and white) rim, and one for the smaller rims at the bottom. Importing those panties on Marvelous Designer, which is my usual workflow, fuses those mats into one and fucks the UV mapping up, meaning that those rims and fabric and stuff will come back all scambled around.

And so ensued 3 days of tinkering around with Marvelous Designer, exporting and reimporting again, to see if I could keep the materials around while still being able to simulate the clothing properly. I learnt a lot about the software, which so far I had only used for its clothing sim features, but guess what: in the end, I just sculpted the f*cking thing on Blender.

Anyway, later the same thing happened with fluid simulation. Just trying things out, changing the like 10 values that can greatly influence the results of the fluid's look around, and waiting 5 mins every time (which to be fair is a very acceptable time) for the simulation to be done. And boom, days gone.

I ditched fluid simulation in the end :')

And that's how I discovered Fluid Painter (and Fluid Painter NSFW) and evolved into SuperMisarmor! Please call me that in the future, because oh boy did I do cool sploodge with it. You'll find said cool sploodge with today's spoilers, by the way.

So yeah. I only had really productive days yesterday and the day before. As I'm writing those lines I only have 3 simple renders to make for that part 1 of quest 2 scene 5 of Emily's content, and then I move onto part 2. And then part 3 and 4. Nice. :)

I think that's enough information for today. I'd say I learn a lot during the past dev cycle and I still got a couple of productive days out of the whole thing so it definitely wasn't all bad, despite my butt hurting just a little more than before.

So on those lines I bid thee goodbye, and I'll see you on the 10th with, I'm sure, many more renders done on my PC. Cheers :)