Dev log 27.04.25

Quite the early dev log this time around!

Hey everyone, so as I was saying earlier this week, I wanted to give you a better look at what's in store for the next few weeks, and the time leading up to update 0.19.

Before we dive into that, let me thank you very much for the great amount of bug reports and support we've been receiving from you since the beta and throughout the Steam release. The fact that you rated DS as overwhelmingly positive is unbelievable. We would have never believed it would take its place among the top-rated adult games on Steam, and... yeah, we still can't believe it. Thank you!

_______

That said, let's continue with the greatest news:

The renders you're seeing here are actually not done by me. I have wanted to involve a second person for rendering for a long time now, and that mission slowly turning out to be a successful one. Hadham is currently working on a special bath scene with Shani, as well as a living room scene with Kateryna. The goal is to be able to create additional content for updates, but at the same time make output indistinguishable from whoever of us both is rendering the scene — which is no easy task. Lighting, poses, camera angles, and expressions... a lot can go wrong or feel out of place. But as you can see, his output in these images is already remarkable.

While he is hard at work creating new content,

I will have to step back a bit and talk a bit about our backlog, small issues that have been stacking up since before Lirah got fed up with her job as a royal guard. There are roughly 100 issues that we've tracked, from additional animations to small dialogue inconsistencies, clipping mistakes in renders, and missing render variations (like characters being in the frame when they shouldn't). I want to work on all that during the next two weeks, and not rush through them, but take my time with what I'd call game maintenance. For that, I might skip next week's dev log as I won't have a lot of new things to report.

_______

Instead,

I will most likely do a "behind the scenes" post. A somewhat step-by-step process of what's going into making a render/scene: How the environment is created, character posing, choosing camera angles, and ultimately putting all of that into code, adding the soundtrack, etc. There have been quite a few people that have asked me about it in the past, and I feel that this is a good opportunity.

About 0.19:

So what are we planning? You have already seen the previews of two scenes. That has Kateryna and Shani covered. But perhaps there will be more of Shani, it's time she puts her skills to use along with the MC. Maybe we'll see what Nadia and Rabiah is up to, or visit the Raider duo again since it's been a while. While Zion will have to be on the backbench for now as we had our share of action oriented cutscenes in 0.17, I'm sure you noticed that we have actually never spoken with Kyra and Asha about anything other than the settlement or what place to raid next.

At this point, we know as much about Kyra's life as we do about Kitty's. Maybe we catch her contemplating life, sitting on the edge of the bridge or something? She will do that at some point, right? We have a shortlist of things we want to show next, and soon we will have a more concrete plan to share for the upcoming update.

_______

Lastly, regarding 0.18:

We are aware of certain bugs, like stuttering animations, which have most likely been caused by faulty video crunching. We will be releasing a new version/update for that in the next few days.

And that would be all for now! Thanks for reading, and now I'll be reading your comments ;)