Dev Update! 7/8/24

Hey, friends! Hope your week's off to a great start!

I've been hard at work for the past few days, and recently crossed the 250 render mark for Chapter 10. Not too much to say about it right now, aside from the fact things are going pretty smoothly. With any luck I'll be around 700 renders by month's end, and close to bringing this update together.

But, since I have to talk about something today, I'll talk about an interesting review I got recently. This player was a little irritated at my 'slow' progress in terms of putting out chapters. Which is.. Fine, I guess! I disagree, but whatever. I think I do an admirable job of getting this thing out the door, as I've never wanted to be a two-updates-a-year dev. But, I know there are games out there with a team to support them, or a game style that lends itself to quick updates. I've mentioned before that if I made a game that was first person only, with purely cosmetic choices, I'd probably be updating monthly. :'D

But! Agree to disagree! What I did take some issue with, was the way this reviewer basically broke down the game in terms of playtime, divided it by the number of days that have passed since the game launched, and came to the conclusion that I'm only producing one minute of gameplay, per work-day. Now, let's set aside that this was based entirely on their own gameplay experience, which will differ considerably based on the choices the player makes, their reading speed, if they replay the game to make different choices, etc.

Let's also put aside that I have a full-time career that sees me work an average of 60+ hours week, that I make time for hobbies and enrichment (reading, exercising, working in my garden), and that I also need to sleep, eat, and occasionally take a week-long vacation. Or that the scope of my 'job' as a developer means doing community engagement, updating my platforms, programming new builds of the game, etc. Or that there was a big gap from the time I launched the game, and when I began active development on Chapter 2, as I had to get a new rendering PC, and then teach myself how to use Daz.

We'll ignore all that, so I can instead talk about something that this reviewer maybe lost sight of: developing this project is not a linear, straightforward process, where every single second of my work translates to time added to the game.

To illustrate this idea, I'm going to talk about an aspect of AVNs that I took for granted as a player -- set design! Now, as a player of several AVNs over the years, I noticed some aspects of the backgrounds. I definitely noticed the bad ones.. The ones that felt weirdly sterile and empty. The ones I saw utilized over, and over again across multiple games. But, for the most part, I didn't really consider them. Boy, did that ever change when I began developing my own game!

First, you have to consider VRAM usage -- if your scene has too much crap in it? Well, it's going to take forever to render. When you're talking about needing dozens or even hundreds of images set in a single location.. Well, you'd better make sure you choose wisely. And of course, you don't want to pick something that's been seen in a hundred-and-one other AVNs.

For the scene in the images above, I wanted Guy to find himself in a run-down part of town, that felt visibly decayed, and desolate. After a bit of searching, I found this cool asset that really matched the vibe I was looking for.

But, one thing I didn't realize was that the ground plane was uneven, with dips and gullies in the street. Perfect for that look of urban decay, but not so much for me, who wanted to throw a ground plane under it -- because said ground plane poked through the uneven street. But, that's okay! I just created some 'primitive' shapes in Daz, in the form of small square planes, textured them with a dirt effect, and then layered them between the ground plane, and the uneven street. Now, it would just look like the road had eroded until the ground beneath it showed through.

Unfortunately, it didn't really look convincing. So, I threw in some weeds and rubble, to further hide poke-through, and sell the illusion. And while I was at it, I sprinkled some more weeds through the scene. Kinda going for that whole early-stages-of-being-reclaimed-by-nature look.

Buuuut, I still needed a little more in the way of backdrop for this asset. I wanted Guy to be entering the scene from an alley, but I'd already used one alley set multiple times.. So, back to the Daz store, where I grabbed this. After a little bit of fine-tuning, and adding some extra trash to the scene to tie everything together, it was looking pretty good! All it needed was a simple curved backdrop to add an extra level of depth, and I had a set!

And having done all this? After hours of searching for and placing props, cameras, lights, and more? I'd contributed a grand total of zero minutes of playtime to the game.

I really hope I'm not coming off as too sour. I love this stuff, and I have a ton of fun working on it, and chatting with you folks about it. But, this isn't like stamping license plates or something, where one input of effort = one unit of product. It's research, and trial and error, and planning, before you even get to the real work.

That said? I'm happy to do it, and to share it with you folks. So, until next time -- take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!