03 - Perfect Son-In-Law

It's been a week since the demo of Perfect Son-In-Law has been released. The launch was decent. This week 700 people added the game to their steam wishlist. That's 600 more than a regular week without updates, announcements, or other marketing events.

If you're not sure what to do with those numbers, welcome to the club. I'm not sure if that's particularely good for an AVN. I do know that in terms of regular games on steam are above average but not amazing.

The game is sitting at 5.800 wishlists. The number people in my situation usually aim for before release is 8.000 - 10.000. That's certainly possible until November. Meaning I'm quietly optimistic.

You'd think that's a good thing, but I wouldn't be so sure. I'm joking of course. It is definitely good. But one thing my optimisim might have lead to is a subtle slow down in development progress. I'm currently working on the renders for Act 3. I finished about 100 already. It's a small Act, so there will only be about 150-200.

Then there is Act 4. It's also rather small, but that's probably another 150-200 renders that need to be done by the end of next week. Doable.

One thing I did this last week is dable into local AI video creation. If you are curious how that went, I posted some previews on my Discord server. For now I tried creating a simple running animation. Ai disagreed and told me that creating a good looking running animation isn't simple at all. In the end I generated a bunch, and none were quite to my liking.

In the end, I gave the same task to Grok, and after a few more tries, I received a way better animation.

sigh

It's to be expected. The resources that are behind something like Grok or ChatGPT are a completely different beast than a free video generation model.

I did gain in experience, though. Maybe if I manage to create something decent in the future I'll add AI video generation to my developer tool kit. People keep telling me that my spicy animations look rather basic. Maybe that's an area where AI can help improve the game? A lot of developers use them nowadays. Even Daz3D projects.

Anyway, there isn't much more to report this time around. The feedback to the demo was overwhelmingly positive, I started working on the next update, things are looking decent, and I learned a thing or two about AI so I won't be crushed by the wheel of time.

Quietly optimistic. Let's leave it at that.