hi all! we had to write this post earlier, but postponed it ..
Added 2020-06-11 14:08:00 +0000 UTChi all!
we had to write this post earlier, but postponed it many times, because it seemed that the amount of work was much smaller than it actually was. Those sponsors who have now reached the date 11.2019 probably noticed that the updates have lost regularity (not to mention the members of the A-club, who have advanced much further in their subscription)
... The fact is that we have learned to do much more beautifully and efficiently. You can see a noticeable improvement in quality on the latest renderings. But in order to get this quality, we had to re-do all the work that we did a couple of months before starting this project.
Once again, second. We are almost done - something like this is a change in the process. A set of clothes and backpacks for several dozen characters was created, unique textures were collected and coloring was adjusted. This work is not yet finalized, but at the finish line. After its completion, updates will again become regular and frequent. But there is one thing - because of significant improvements in quality, we have lost speed and maintaining a pace of 35 panels per month, it may be physically impossible.
This is a full time project, but the amount of work has grown by 2-3 times relative to what we expected at the start. We had a poor idea of how much effort and time it would take. Of course, we will try to maintain the pace of work at the same level (although this will significantly reduce the profitability of the project for us), but it may turn out that we will have to reduce the speed from 35 panels per month to less if we do not have time to physically make so many pages .
The farther, the more subtle and complex work you have to do for characters whose weight will increase. volumes of bodies are growing, which requires refinement by hand. It is not possible to automate this without a radical loss of quality at this stage, this is currently our main problem. We came up with a few cheats, but this only slightly optimized the processes. Currently, due to the need to remake a huge amount of clothing, surroundings (several new locations) and backpacks, we can’t even accurately calculate our productivity in the new technological process. It will take us 1-2 months to get clean statistics of our performance, taking into account all the new and factors.
This will become possible after we complete the changes, which are actually “one-time work”, i.e. the work that needs to be done before making new pages. After that, we plan to fix the speed of appearance of new pages in their pure form (when we can take into account only the work that is required directly for these pages). After that we can get the exact numbers. But first, we would like to listen to the opinion of our sponsors - is the quality good enough to sacrifice a few pages per month (some slowdown). Or would everyone prefer to get as many pages as possible, sacrificing quality?
We will conduct an internal vote inside our private server to count more accurately. Now it is rather just a status report and an invitation to a free discussion. Your opinion will allow us to better plan the strategy for this and other subsequent projects. As we mentioned earlier - a little later we plan to do animation and possibly even real-time interactive games. Actually, we already have a couple of almost finished games. We did not have time to complete some of the little things in them and improve the graphics and animation. When all the fuss is stabilized - we will develop all this further. But the main question that bothers us so far ... is 3D good enough to compete with the more familiar 2D seriously?
p,s. and yet - we want to make this project truly powerful and that all pages are in the same style, after our work schedule is finally stabilized in our free time from the main task (creating new pages) - we will slowly improve all early pages to a new level quality.
early and betterl update version
we had to write this post earlier, but postponed it many times, because it seemed that the amount of work was much smaller than it actually was. Those sponsors who have now reached the date 11.2019 probably noticed that the updates have lost regularity (not to mention the members of the A-club, who have advanced much further in their subscription)
... The fact is that we have learned to do much more beautifully and efficiently. You can see a noticeable improvement in quality on the latest renderings. But in order to get this quality, we had to re-do all the work that we did a couple of months before starting this project.
Once again, second. We are almost done - something like this is a change in the process. A set of clothes and backpacks for several dozen characters was created, unique textures were collected and coloring was adjusted. This work is not yet finalized, but at the finish line. After its completion, updates will again become regular and frequent. But there is one thing - because of significant improvements in quality, we have lost speed and maintaining a pace of 35 panels per month, it may be physically impossible.
This is a full time project, but the amount of work has grown by 2-3 times relative to what we expected at the start. We had a poor idea of how much effort and time it would take. Of course, we will try to maintain the pace of work at the same level (although this will significantly reduce the profitability of the project for us), but it may turn out that we will have to reduce the speed from 35 panels per month to less if we do not have time to physically make so many pages .
The farther, the more subtle and complex work you have to do for characters whose weight will increase. volumes of bodies are growing, which requires refinement by hand. It is not possible to automate this without a radical loss of quality at this stage, this is currently our main problem. We came up with a few cheats, but this only slightly optimized the processes. Currently, due to the need to remake a huge amount of clothing, surroundings (several new locations) and backpacks, we can’t even accurately calculate our productivity in the new technological process. It will take us 1-2 months to get clean statistics of our performance, taking into account all the new and factors.
This will become possible after we complete the changes, which are actually “one-time work”, i.e. the work that needs to be done before making new pages. After that, we plan to fix the speed of appearance of new pages in their pure form (when we can take into account only the work that is required directly for these pages). After that we can get the exact numbers. But first, we would like to listen to the opinion of our sponsors - is the quality good enough to sacrifice a few pages per month (some slowdown). Or would everyone prefer to get as many pages as possible, sacrificing quality?
We will conduct an internal vote inside our private server to count more accurately. Now it is rather just a status report and an invitation to a free discussion. Your opinion will allow us to better plan the strategy for this and other subsequent projects. As we mentioned earlier - a little later we plan to do animation and possibly even real-time interactive games. Actually, we already have a couple of almost finished games. We did not have time to complete some of the little things in them and improve the graphics and animation. When all the fuss is stabilized - we will develop all this further. But the main question that bothers us so far ... is 3D good enough to compete with the more familiar 2D seriously?
p,s. and yet - we want to make this project truly powerful and that all pages are in the same style, after our work schedule is finally stabilized in our free time from the main task (creating new pages) - we will slowly improve all early pages to a new level quality.
early and betterl update version
