Dev Update! 8/12/24

Hey, friends! Hope all's well with you and yours this week!

I've spent the past few days doing a lot of rendering, and we're rapidly approaching the 500 render mark for Chapter 10. I'd slowed down a bit due to the script needing more work, but now I'm back at the art side of things.

Part of the reason I had to rework a bit of the script, was because I decided to add a few small scenes. I talked about this a little bit in the most recent Sneak Peek post, but I'll recap here. If you recall, in Chapter 9 you have the option to dispatch your lovely assistant to bring Mason to the eye doctor. This has a few immediate impacts -- one of which is that Nicki will be present at the end of Chapter 9, which then leads to extra/different scenes at the beginning of Chapter 10. That then leads to more plot branching, before I bring everything back together with a choice.

• Bring Mason to the eye doctor.

• Don't bring Mason to the eye doctor.

Now, no big spoilers, but the original plan was that, if you take Mason yourself, that means that you also go on a shopping trip, and generally spend more time together.

But, the original plan for the alternate route where you don't take Mason, was more like.. "You don't take Mason? 'kay, skipping ahead to the Gabby scene!"

And I sat there for about a week, kicking the whole thing around, trying to decide whether or not I wanted to add more scenes. The idea I came up with was basically that, if you took Mason to the eye doctor, you could still get one of three optional scenes, plus Mason's shopping trip. If you delegated the task to Nicki, or just decided to skip it (you monster!), you could get all three optional scenes. So, I mulled it over.

Ultimately, I opted to listen to Devil Neon. The good news is that you get more content! Yay! The bad news is that it's going to take me a little longer. I intentionally wrote these additional scenes in such a way that they won't take me too much time. They basically all have a beginning, followed by a fade-to-black, followed by a slight jump ahead to the meat of the scene, which justifies its inclusion.

As a result, you'll get to see more of some characters that I didn't plan to have return until Chapter 11, including -- Brittani! Yes, seeing as how the player knows Brittani is starting her first day at Chesty Cheetahs, I figured.. Why not drop by and say hi? :D

But! Bringing this scene together wouldn't be easy. The biggest challenge is that crowd scenes are just like.. Really tough in Daz. Every figure eats up a ton of VRAM, and slows rendering to a crawl. Especially when your GPU only has a modest 8 GB. So, I had to get creative.

For my first draft of the scene, I took a restaurant model I'd already re-textured to have cheetah-print booths/chairs, as well as a bunch of resource-saving shaders applied to the walls and floors. Then, I populated it with some low-poly figures. The results were.. Fine.

At a glance, I think this would pass muster. The important stuff is in the foreground, and our low-poly figures are blurred by camera focus shift. Now sure, if you look closer, well..

Okay, if I ever make a horror game, I'll definitely use these! But, this ain't that kind of game! So, I decided to take another pass. The first thing I needed? More people! This is supposed to be a bustling, busy restaurant -- a stark contrast to Guy's own, less successful diner. So, the first thing I needed was new waitresses. For which I turned to one of my favorite cheap tricks -- billboards!

 

 

 

There! Now we have some smoking hot (but two-dimensional) waitresses for our background. Now, even though they can't move or interact with anyone, I think they're still an improvement over.. This.

 *shudder*

That's the stuff of nightmares. But, after a bit more work, adding more diners, my new waitresses, and food, I had something much better.

 Took a little more work, but I think it was worth it. And now I never, ever have to do another scene with a big crowd, ever again.

Right? Right, Devil Neon?

 Crap!

Until next time, take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!