Development Update 28/01/2025

Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience waiting for another dev log. Before we get into what I've been doing, I want to confirm that future dev logs will be available to the public. After gathering opinions on this decision through my patrons, I realised, by opening access to my development progress to the public, I can potentially attract more interest on my game and further grows my community. So, here it is. Now, let's get into it.

Progress

As of now, my render count has reached the 600 mark. Now, I'll admit that it's a bit slow, but sadly, I'm not in a position where I can work on this everyday for an extended period of time. Right now, I'm doing everything I can to pump out more renders with every minute I get. Once I'm finished with the renders, I can move on to getting the sound effects and music done, which would not be too difficult.

Since chapter 2 contains a little more content than chapter 1, I hope that the playtime will increase as well. In chapter 1, the playtime is approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour. Hopefully in chapter 2, the playtime will extend to over 1 hour.

Planned work

Let me gather on what I'm planning to do for this update.

- New music + Sound effect

- Make save game nameable

- Get rid of the click-before-continue Scarlett picture in chapter 1

- Display MC's last name in the naming screen

- Considering giving sound effects a colour in dialogues

- Remake choice menu

- Fix Android version (See #bug-report)

Blender Moment

I tried to mess around with Blender for a bit, again, and all I'm going to say is I won't spend too much time exploring it right now. There are so many things I don't understand and so many things I want to learn but there's just no time. Previously I thought that migrating to Blender would be a great idea, which I still think it would be, but it's impossible to half ass this migration. So many things need to be figured out such as skin textures, lighting, animation, rendering, and so on. For now, I should put my focus directly in Daz3D since it's what works at the moment, even though it's terrible. I'm talking about you can't even hide objects with a hotkey kind of terrible. Anyway, I'm keen on migrating, but I won't start considering again until after chapter 3.

Patrons Benefit

I haven't looked at the Patrons' benefits in so long. Now that I've seen it I realised, I should probably update it soon. In the future, previews should be patrons only, I think it's a fair trade-off for dev log going public. Also, I should start committing to the render benefits. I completely forgot about the exclusive wallpapers Patrons should get. I'm thinking on top of the character renders that I do regularly, Patrons should get an exclusive render each month as well. If there are other benefits you would like to see included, please let me know.

Animation

After this chapter, I think I should spend some more time enhancing my animation skill. Truth be told, the animations in chapter 1 is sub-par, shit maybe even. Right now, I'm animating in Blender and exporting the keyframes back into Daz3D for rendering because the animation environment in Daz is insufferable. You know what, maybe I should just render in Blender. It's quicker, more convenient, and most of all, it doesn't try to fuck me in the ass like Daz does. I can do everything in Blender: posing, camera movements, jiggle physics, interpolation, and so on... Anyway, something I'm considering.

Hardware limitation

Guess what, I'm still rocking the mighty RTX 3080. It's been good for me in chapter 1, but I slowly realise it wasn't enough. Even in chapter 1 I had to do some crazy optimisation just to render a large scene. You may noticed the random black figures in some renders and that's basically a product of endless torture trying to go under the VRAM limit. Although, recently I discovered static mesh rendering, so I'll go back to re-render those. Either way, I'm trying to save up and upgrade in the very near future. Hopefully the 5090, if it'll ever be in stock, or a used 4090. I no longer want to work with a default render time of 15 minutes for one in-door render.

Acknowledgement

Thank you to all of my supporters, patrons and members. Once again, It's a pretty magical feelings, realising that there are people out there actually playing this game I make. I will never be tired of acknowledging this feeling. As always, feedbacks are encouraged. I want to hear what everyone is thinking about the game because I want this journey to be filled with eagerness to improve. I enjoy learning and will never stop learning. And with your help, I will only get better in making half porn games. Valentine render coming soon.