It's the "Strappy top" update...

Hi, hi!

First off apologies for being a bit absent on a progress update last week. It wasn't the plan as I'll explain in a bit.

So in my last post I said how I wanted to start bringing the game together. Adding the renders made to the script etc, and by the Thursday of that week I'd wrapped up six modules which was pretty good going for just four days I thought. Since I also now had a second PC I cast my eye over some of the later modules I wasn't so happy with, and in particular the pool game with Annie.

It wasn't terrible by any means, having a couple of animations and a playable game, but it was a bit lacking I felt. Certainly if I compared it to Sarah's or the domme module. So, with the extra powah, I went to see what I could do...

Quite a lot as it turned out and by the end of that week, I'd completely re-coded the whole thing and built some further animations to make it feel a bit more immersive and like an actual game. So at this stage my plan was, instead of showing you a few stills, to give you a playable demo. Show off a bit y'know? And also to show you the what benefits of having the second PC had brought us all. All I needed was to make sure the animations looked ok...

And this is where it started to be a trial. Almost every day last week I was tweaking and rebuilding the ani's and oft going to bed with the happy thought that "tomorrow I can release the demo..." that was until I saw the animations in the morning and had to tweak them yet again.

The key problems were that Daz (the image software) isn't really designed to be an animation tool, and certainly a lot of the clothing assets were never designed with animation in mind. Add to that that Daz gets grumpy if you try to layer clothing assets on top of each other (such as a strappy top over a bra) and things start to become challenging. Of course, there was the other factor of me wanting to just generally improve some of the animations as well of course, with the strip animation, even when not glitching being tweaked to just look better and smoother.

So, in short, it took me longer than expected although, as those of you who have been following progress on discord will know, not for lack of effort. That said, it's streets ahead of what we had originally and I think the complete module will add nicely to your enjoyment of the chapter. Each level comes out at around 750 renders, so the whole module is some 3,500. On the one hand, I'm pretty vexed with myself it took so long. On the other, I've made a fully animated trick shot pool game in just over a week and a half...

I've put the playable demo behind the $1 wall for you for those that are curious.

Completion news

It's really just slog and focus now and going back to the plan of wrapping up the modules as complete as quick as I can. I'll look to take some time off work this month to see if I can pull back the time the pool module took to be able to make a maximum effort.

Final product will be some 18,000 renders I think, which is 50% bigger than Chapter Three. Thankfully this is where the size levels off until Chapter Seven, with Five and Six being about the same size. One of the things I'd actually planned when writing the plot for H5 was to have this step change in size at the start. One being the smallest, then Two slightly bigger up to the current size. This was to allow me to prevent biting off more than I could chew and also to increment the hardware to match the chapter size as we went along. And so far, so good :)

Anyhoooo, that's it for now. Again, as is usual at this stage of progress, I'll be fairly quiet socially. Although I enjoy, and indeed recognise the importance of, engaging with you all, I'm also mindful that the clock is ticking and I find it hard timewise to bounce between the focus needed for the completion and the comms, especially with the complexity of this chapter. I trust you'll understand that I want to focus on completion work at the moment. Next progress post will be on the 20th of this month to give me a good run at this.

Take care, 

Notty