Weekly Update - Jan 31st

Hi Everyone,

I'm stuck in render purgatory right now, I swear I must have angered the rendering gods because I am still rendering out the scene I told you all I started in last week's update. It must be close to the largest single scene I have done in the game from a renders perspective. I'm currently rendering image 113 of the scene right now, there's also 2 animations on top of that, with still another 40 or so stills and 3 animations to go! Renders in this environment I am using are also on the longer side, each render is taking around an hour to complete and they take a while to set up too, I'm averaging only around 10 renders a day. The thing is to the player, it won't be obvious how heavy a scene this is. So why am I doing this to myself? Well it's a hugely important scene, a one I want to get right.

While I'm whining here, let's talk a little bit about the rendering approach, or at least my approach. The simplest scenes to render are ones where the character stay put, maybe change a few expressions from time to time, but generally stay in one place. You can get away with maybe a handful of images for different expressions, you can re-use certain renders again throughout the dialogue. When I have to move a character around, change their pose, have them carry stuff or change clothes etc, that's when the renders go up. Different camera angles too mean more renders. This one particular scene has a ton of subtle movement and a lot of the images are used for just one frame. I've been trying to double up frames a little, like a lot of other devs do, to cut down the renders required (so sometimes for example you will see both characters mouths open talking, rather than just the character that is actually talking in the script, please forgive a little artist licence here).

Anyway, positively, the scene and chapter are flowing really nicely and looking good, there are a few renders that could perhaps be touched up a little and I'll take a look at that once I get onto end to end testing. After this one scene things should speed up again as the remaining scenes planned (which are all fully scripted now) are less intensive and shouldn't be anywhere near the effort of the behemoth here :)

So ETA for Chapter 6? I dunno is the honest answer, I'm still targeting around Feb 15th but I won't know for sure until I complete this scene. I will asses things then I will leave it open to whether I go back to releasing a part chapter earlier, with the 2nd part to follow. I don't really want to go down that route if I can help it.

To help serve our "Great Friends" Tier folks though, I will release Chapter 5 complete to them around the Feb 10th which keeps me to my promise to make available content 30 days after the "Best Friend" tier folks get it. I hope that helps a little.

I'm toying with making Chapter 4 totally free at some point too. I know I said I didn't want to go down that route but once Chapter 6 is complete, there is enough unique content out there to justify the move. This will however firmly be the last free chapter I release though, anymore would comprise not only this platform but also the future Steam release.

I think that's it for my ramble this week, my rendering rig has just finished another one so I had best get to setting up the next scene.

If you got this far down, I admire your patience, take care and as always thank you so much for your continued support, it truly means the world to me.

Fae