Dev Diary, January 13th, 2023

I've only been doing story renders this week, and have been working myself through some really enjoyable scenes.

I love making these scenes where you spend some time together with the girls one on one and get to know them a bit better. Most of the time it's not that they are actually sharing past secrets, but the way they react to you telling some of yours. This is something I used in Leap of Faith too when you sit on the bench with Cece in the park and she starts crying. I think it's a much better way of getting to know the girls and how they are as a person, rather than giving an exposition dump in form of verbal information.

I gave the content made so far a rough playthrough, and I was not happy with the pacing. Things were moving too fast and too much happening at once. So I decided to up the amount of content in each episode. In LoF, each chapter covered two days, but that is simply not enough time for U4IA. So in order to make each episode feel like an actual episode story with a beginning, middle, and end, each U4ia update will cover at least 3 days in-game.

Converting that to actual content should be about double the size of the average LoF chapter, which should also work well with the planned Steam seasons consisting of four episodes each. Current finished work is 1,109 story renders and 6,558 frames of animation.

Next week I'll keep working on these one-on-one scenes, and when they are done I should be able to start looking for that small sparkling light that tells me there's an end to the tunnel somewhere.

Lots of work to do still, but lots of fun doing it.

The preview picture this time is from the lovely Teagan. Sometimes you do a bunch of renders, but don't see the obvious mistake until after you're done (her eyebrows). Oh well, load, correct, re-render.

Also thanks to Wibble for helping me separate the front of her dress so I could give her a little wardrobe accident which is slightly visible in the image.

Have a nice weekend, and stay safe out there.

// Drifty