Progress Log

Been a bit since the last proper progress log.

Purple Dream:

Purple Dream's development has been all over the place, not in a bad way though. A part of it has been finishing updating the clothing clothing that was outdated and broken due to the changes I made to the models a few months ago, which I had mentioned previously. All clothing has now been updated to fit the revamped Aika/Shizumi models, and they all now work well once again. The second part has been making more clothing here and there, which means to make a ton of clothing that will never see the light of day for various reasons, and then here and there you have a few that have made it into the game. The third part is more POI work. Working on more locations stuff, decor, etc.

Standard stuff, but the bulk of the work has actually been improving some systems, and trying to address some issues. First, lighting, I've been messing around, tweaking, testing so many different methods and configurations for lighting. The main reason for it, and issue, being some of the problems the game has had with lighting, such as light bleeding. This is one of those things that I've always had a problem with, but never really found a proper solution to. Simply put, this was an issue with Hana Exposure too, but due to not really finding a good way to solve it, I ended up placing dozens of invisible cubes on every single POI in order to stop the light from bleeding. Not an ideal solution, but it got the job done, and my patience had been worn thin with the issue. I finally decided to properly go for round 2 on this issue.

There was 2 things that could be done to mitigate the issue. One, bump up certain settings, very straightforward, but the issue is it kills performance. Two, Unity did not like the way I was modelling the POIs, which was a big part of the issue being there in the first place. I had to test, learn, and get used to a new way to go about how I make the POIs, and I've worked it out. The problem is that this does mitigate the issue, but it doesn't solve it, it mitigates it. There was still a bit of the light bleeding. I was trying to avoid bumping up the setting for the sake of not killing performance, but ultimately, after much tinkering and trying out various things, I gave in and found a solid config that mitigates the issue to the point of it no longer being one, without sacrificing an important amount of performance.

This little issue did result in two other issues. First, I now needed to go back and partially remake the structures of every POI, and update them to now use this new and "correct" method of making the POIs. Second, the shaders did not like the lighting settings changes, and needed to be tweaked as well. Of course, these changes were also happening while I was fixing the lighting stuff, and it became this vicious cycle where I tweak A to fix the issue, but B is now broken, I fix B, but turns out, A needs more tweaking, which only breaks B again, etc. Fun.

So, issues with lighting, models, and shaders, where any change only created issues for the other two. It's all looking good now though.

Quick side note, the PD pic on the post is Aika's room. That's a proper gameplay in-game screenshot, just with the UI disabled. It's a really important location for Aika's gameplay with tons of mechanics. It's a hub. The kitchen has been busy cooking here, and all of the mechanics that go along with it. it was going to be this month's post with a small early showcase vid, but I'm still getting through the finishing touches to this revamped wardrobe system, so bear with me a bit longer. In the spirit of having some finishing touches to get to due to revamps, the ceiling light model is also missing. It was a part of the structure model initially, but while doing the revamp of the model, I had remove the light from the ceiling and forgot to import it later on its own. Small things that are short and simple to fix, but there's a bunch of them.

As for recordings, I've been thinking, Patreon does not like videos, so I was thinking of uploading them to X/Twitter. The actual posts, breakdowns, screenshots, details, etc. Are of course still here on Patreon, but little WIP sneak peek videos would be on X/Twitter. Thoughts?

Optimizations. Anyone who has been here for a while may remember that around v0.6 of Blooming Flower, there was an issue that was making the game take up almost 20gb of ram, quite literally unplayable for most players. It wasn't exactly something like a bug or a glitch, but was instead just the fact that the whole CG/sprite systems were implemented in a way that was terrible for memory, which couldn't really be fixed in a proper way, so I ended up compressing everything a lot more. Now, in order to avoid that problem here, I've gone back to update some of the systems that are up and running that could cause such issues later down the road. Mainly the wardrobe system, and clothing system as a whole. The character and clothing models aren't that well optimized, which isn't really an issue so long as the system that takes care of it all is solid and has that performance backbone in place, which is what I added. I still have to make these changes and improvements to the CG event systems though.

Frail Flower:

Not much to say here, other than progress being steady. There's been some minor challenges, but nothing big. For the sake of not leaving this area too empty, one such issue was with the first few pages, there's a lot of exposition early on in order to set up the rest of the doujin, but fitting that much text was an issue. Those pages were precisely made in a way that would leave plenty of room for text, but it was still an issue, and required a lot of tinkering on the panels, and trying various things with the text, as well as some minor rewrites for the sake of condensing the text. I've settled on something that works. Fortunately, past those first few pages, the text load is a lot more standard .

Tiny little peek with the Hana pic on the post. I don't intend on spoiling things though, so I'll be leaving it at that. Looking at the current pace, the first part of the doujin that will come out on Patreon should drop mid-August, and from then on it should be a monthly drop. It'll be divided in 4 to 5 parts.

Thank you for supporting the development of Purple Dream!