So quick update on the total for March. I got 395 renders done in the month of March and that is not counting the very productive last week of February (135 renders). It's been a good stretch for sure. A little render fatigue set in, and I think I probably could have gotten another 100 in, if I wasn't so spent. I feel good now. Scene 12 is fairly short (famous last words) and I'm hoping to be done either tonight or tomorrow before lunch. Turns out the gallery still doesn't work, so I'll have a look at that. However, I don't think that is a main focus for this release. There is some coding stuff that I would love to clear up for this release. Some of it has to do with tracking choices so it makes sense (not that it doesn't right now, but I can feel the logic breaking soon if I don't fix it now), the other thing is, as I have mentioned before, the animation coding. I'm hoping to take a bite out of the to-do list and clean some things up that has nothing to do with renders. I also feel like I should just write out what the choices do when player is offered one. Makes little sense to me when the player isn't privy to the information. If you have thought on that, let me know.
Scene 11 took a tad longer than expected, but I finished it this last week. I apologize for the day late log, but I wanted to at least have a render for the flashback (scene 12) to show. Most of my work Sunday went into setting up a forward camp for the platoon. Again, it's cobbled together with the help of several assets. It's always exciting to find angles in a new environment though. I wanted dog-tags for this scene and the only asset I could find is for earlier genesis figures, so a little hard to pose...which may come back to bite me later on in the scene. The name on the tags was easy to change, Photoshop has gotten way more proficient with the help of AI for that sort of application. Last week I got a little over 60 renders done. Again, not the 100-render goal. Still acceptable. Only 3 more scenes after this one. I anticipate a few extra renders for some of the scenes once I code it all. Tomorrow I'll post the grand total for March...if for no other reason than to make myself feel good:-)
I've been thinking of the space in-between episodes. Not incredibly serious, but still a thought. Current episode is still the one that occupies my mind. However, there is a creative curiosity that propels my mind in this endeavor, and maybe it opens the door to a sort of short story, where Pecker gets to solve a minor case...in-between two major cases. The thinking on my part is obviously that I will be working on this AVN in the foreseeable future and beyond. Part of that will be determined on some sort of success with the current game. Not sure what that looks like currently. I am determined (and I think that is a big part of it) to make a AVN that is interesting. I also think that given time, a well-made AVN can have a life. If I'm wrong, this may be an exercise in futility, but I remain positive. I have the second case of Pecker PI kind of mapped out, but I am curious as to the interest in a short form case that would be a couple of chapters only. It would be a standalone case, probably with just a few locations, but with the characters you already know. So, the question is: if we continue Pecker PI as it is, would you be interested in a short reprieve in the story, or would you like to get right into the next major case?
I imagined that I would finish scene 11 in one day. Silly me. I'm still rendering same scene. It's partly because of the environment being a bit more detailed than what I expected, which has led to some restarts of the program, but also because I once again made a meal out of the scene. I will finish it today and move on to the flashback which will hint at a pretty big story point that will be fully revealed in the next chapter. There is also the introduction of a character that will be reoccurring in the future. Total renders: 1,104, so 80 this week. March is an incredibly underrated month;-)
Another week has gone by with some pretty good progress. Have been working on replacing music and adding some sound effects. About midway through the first chapter. The flashbacks are probably the most time consuming when it comes to the audio. As I mentioned, they will have ambient sound and some sound fx, so they are more layered in terms of audio. We are at the beginning of scene 11, which will also feature a flashback as Amy pries some information out of Pecker...but what the hell, it's a free dinner. Currently at 1,024 renders, so my early estimate of 1,200 total for the chapter is probably a little short of the truth. The restaurant scene has some patrons and a waitress, so the total number is a little deceiving as I have to spot render a bunch of the shots to add patrons. It's still quite a bit faster than letting my graphics card work overtime on more characters. I was hoping to finish scene 11 today, but it might be wishful thinking. Once Amy and Pecker sit down, it should speed up the process though. I think next week will be another good one, but I'm not entirely sure of my schedule yet.
Good day everyone! I didn't get to post a midweek update, so apologies for that. It's been another busy week. Yesterday I started scene 10, and today I hit 926 total renders. So, an even 100 this week. March will (I know I shouldn't do this) probably be the best month of this update in terms of productivity and get us really close to finishing the render portion of the update. Two notes on that: I'm an optimist and I wrote "probably". I think that will hold up well in AVN court:-) Scene 10 is a little cafe break with Valerie in Rackham's French Quarters. No, they will not be speaking English with an Inspector Clouseau accent. Been working a bit on the music. I never really paid too much attention to it. Wasn't even going to add any until I polled here. But now that I have decided to put some effort into it, I realize how hard it is to get the tone right. I hope it will be better than before. I'm sure the ambient audio will be better, since I didn't have a lot of that prior. The audio will still be dominated by music.
Sorry. Yesterday got away from me a little bit. This will be super short. I reached 826 renders total, so 36 renders. Not quite what I hope for a week, but RL was busy. I'm not too worried as this week looks really good in terms of render hours. I might come back mid-week and post an image, but we are currently begrudgingly in the ring with Vicky as part of the deal Sam made up for Pecker to workout at the gym for free. Right now rendering, hence the short update.
Daz has been incredibly cooperative this week. Not a single freeze of the software. I applaud this! Of course, mostly it's an ulcer medicine, not medicine that cures mind you...medicine that creates the ulcer. Which I am thoroughly opposed to. Yesterday I started scene 9, yes, we skipped right past scene 8 (which is done) and making some serious headway on scene 9. I added a short part to the scene which I think is pretty nice. Most of it will be the first training session with Victoria at Sam's request.
For the first time since that beautiful start of January, I feel good about the progress. What a crappy few weeks that followed. Natural disasters, computer disasters, but no personal disasters. So silver lining? I'm quite happy to write this log because things are moving at a pace that I like. The current render count is 790, which means that this week was a 135-render week. (exclamation point?)
So, with everything that has been going on, I've probably lost about 2 months and change working on the project. This in itself is obviously bad news. The upside though, is that in an uninterrupted period of working on Pecker, I could potentially get close to that very optimistic goal of 3 months. I'd say that 4 months for a chapter without any catastrophes is probably a sounder estimate. That's still pretty good. I'll keep plugging away.
Once chapter 5 is completed, I'll create a Steam page. It won't affect my patreons. I might ask for wish-list clicks, but that's it. I'll probably aim for chapter 8 release on Steam and that will affect the pace a little as I will aim to fix some renders in Chapter 1. Nothing major, but those renders were done on my mac air, and they are a little noisy:-) When it comes down to it, the writing is much more important to me, but it's a package deal. I am still not sure about this plan. My first instinct was to release on Steam as the first case comes to a close and offer the finished product. But it seems that the general consensus is that unless you are selling BaD, it makes financial sense to do early releases on Steam. I'm not sure how that sits with my moral compass, but in the interest of trying to make it beyond the first case I might have to go down that road. Don't worry, the first case will 100% be finished, because you all have supported that very idea. The compass would be pretty upset if that goal was not reached.
There is more, but it's getting a little long. So...
I was hoping to get through scene 7 today (actually yesterday, but let's not talk about that). I will finish it up tomorrow. I wrote a bit more than I had originally planned for the scene, which translates to more renders. Landed at a 655 renders total, so a productive week. My goal this next week is to finish scene 8 and at least set up scene 9. I feel like the tempo is picking up and hope to maintain that until this chapter is finished.
Got the new and improved code, so will start to plug in music and sound fx shortly.
Had a couple of minutes today, so I got one done that wasn't too far from set up. Might do another couple in this set up. Tomorrow will be time to render the chapter work.
Continuing scene 7 this week. Ending at a total of 575 renders, which seems super low considering how long it's been since the update. I'm hoping to make quick progress with this scene and get through to the next scene this week. 9/10/11 are somewhat complicated for different reasons, but once set up they should be pretty straight forward.
Got some music done this week, but it's a little like the Forrest Gump box of chocolate. Also got some writing done for current chapter.
The improved renpy code is done, but I haven't taken a look yet (it's a bit of a pc vs mac thing)...hopefully it's the opposite of the Forest Gump box of chocolate and exactly what I expect it to be.
Ahh, the famous no render case log. I thoroughly dislike it, but a funny thing happened this week. Well, maybe not funny exactly, more like disappointing and aggravating. As I mentioned in previous log, I uninstalled daz and catalogued lots of assets, which turned out to be for the birds. There were remnants of at least one version of daz lurking and preventing the new version from creating proper paths. So I bit the bullet and restored the computer to factory settings and erased all files. It has fixed the issues, and I'm not going to think about the obviously easier solutions that the brain comes up with while everything is being erased.
So it finally looks like I can start rendering scene 7 in earnest...which makes me happy, but January started out looking like a month for the record books and failed to live up to the perfect beginnings. I will make all efforts to have February be what January failed to be.
Looking at some sound fx for the lewd scenes and some ambient city and forest sounds that I can use as to not have wall to wall music. I'll also start to pick music for individual scenes as soon as I have the new code.
Last couple of weeks haven't exactly been awesome. Electrical failure, clean-up of PC, a lingering cold and asset management (out of all things, sorting through assets may have been the worst...aggravated by the cold). Still having issues with Daz. Reinstalled to fix an issue, which resulted in me not being able to log in and it didn't fix the original problem. I'll get it fixed on Tuesday and hopefully have a great render day.
But scene 7 work has begun in earnest. Back at the speakeasy with Mr. Bellarosa, Miss Bellarosa, Camille, and Detective Turis. Seems like trouble to me.
It has been a curious week. After the promo render of the mayor, I got going on scene 7 in earnest...or that was what I was thinking. I managed 2 renders averaging about 3.5 hrs a piece. At that pace we'll see chapter 5 release Christmas 2035. I've been up against it with hard drive space on my desktop for the longest time and haven't wanted to deal with it for the same amount of time. Until now. Render being slow was probably not just a symptom of a space issue, but it didn't help.
Tuesday night, after stupidly waiting 7 hours for renders that needed post denoising anyway, I decided to clean up the HD. I've made a few passes on organizing my assets, but the methods have always been less than perfect and left me with more duplicates and less easy to find. So I erased a few versions of daz, all assets and cleared a ton of space. Wednesday I started to install only assets that are used or potentially used for Pecker. And they will be organized in a way that makes sense to me. This, of course, is tedious work. I hate tedious work. Some people get satisfaction out of this kind of monotony, but it drives me insane. And all I want to do is to render. No turning back now though. On Tuesday, I hope to get all assets needed, installed and catalogued. After that I hope to feel like there is some long term time savings in doing this to make it worth "The Shining" moments I am having, "All work and no play-", you know?
Sorry, this is becoming more of a Discord "Pocket-Diary" moment than a case log. The positive work accomplished this week has been 2 very average renders, one nice promo and image post work completed for scenes 1-6, which is the real progress this week. It usually doesn't happen until toward the end of the process, but this will speed things up a bit when putting it together in Renpy.
All is well on my end and I got a surprise day of rendering in. I felt the need to render a promo image (something I don't particularly like doing as it always takes time away from what is important, but in the interest of growing Pecker...it's probably something I'll have to do on a more regular basis). Rendering of scene 7 has started and I'll be back on Sunday or Monday to report the progress.
Please do NOT repost this. I feel that it's fair to alert the paying members of the current situation where I live, but I would appreciate if it didn't leave this site.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were earmarked as render days. I got up early on Monday, thought I'd render Mayor Drake's Player Card and then get going with the interior of scene 7, which I set up on the 6th. I finished 1 render for the mayor's player card and during the rendering for the character selection page, the power shut off. Not the first time it happens so I waited patiently. Then I checked my phone and the world is on fire. I've been issued evacuation warnings a couple of times (warnings go out, but it's a precaution not mandatory. Evacuation Orders are different). I'm still fine, but the cars are loaded and ready to go. Got power back this morning, but there is no rendering planned until the situation is under control. Unfortunately more fires are starting than are put out, so please be patient. I will halt subscriptions if the situation gets worse. I totally understand if you halt your subscription on your end. I hope to be back to work sooner rather than later, but currently I'm focused on staying ahead of the flames. I'm not going to give you an exact location, but I'm sure you can guess approximately where I am by this post. I appreciate you all and will be back to work on Pecker PI as soon as I can. I have the backup of the project packed up, so nothing should be lost if it gets worse.
This may have been a record-breaking week of rendering (and some writing). I'm still going today, but it will only be another few renders as I need to set up the scene for the Red Hot Kitten speakeasy. Currently at 495 renders and definitely hit 500 today. Last Monday we were at 335, I believe. In the last 6 days, I've managed 5 days averaging 8 hours/day working on the renders. Scene 6 is done and I've almost finished the exterior part of scene 7 (which if you want to be picky, would have it's own scene number). So hitting just below 500 at the end of scene 6 probably means that the chapter render count will be around 1300 give or take. Not making any predictions on anything else, but I love the progress this week. Every week of January won't be like this one, but it's looking like a decent render month.
For scene 6, I redesigned Mayor Drake. Was going to kill her off, but it didn't really fit into the story, so I hope I made her more attractive as Pecker will get an opportunity to get to know her better in the future (not this chapter). I will work on her player card and others to round out the current characters before the update happens.
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, if you celebrate such things. On the development side, January should be quite a bit better than both November and December has been. I realized that my optimism still gets the better of me...nearly all the time, so please keep that in mind when you read my posts. It's never that I mean to deceive, it's just that my normal is much closer to positive than negative...and I use "normal" in the loosest sense possible:-)
Anyway. Currently 335 images rendered in total. Scene 6 is set up to some degree, it's a couple of locations out of which one is new. Outside of rendering I've gotten some help with coding, which means that the game is transferring to the latest version of Renpy. The previous plan was to clean everything up prior to releasing chapter 10, but in the interest of not breaking anything later on I will (careful with the optimism, see above) work on a few things now. The coding help means that a few things will be added, fixed, or improved. The main menu will get a little boost with something I tried to do myself, but failed at and it will include links to discord, patreon and subscribe star for the game. The character cards will be locked until the characters are introduced in the game. The opacity of the text box will be adjustable in settings. The gallery will be live. The saves will be nameable. I think that might be it for the UI. It will unfortunately result in saves being broken.
I will add some code, so I can call back certain moments that affect the story, change the coding for animations which should fix the drop out of the music during the animation (still not going to mess with the existing animations as that seems like too much at the moment, and it shouldn't affect the saves once I do). A new music library. I've found a site that I can subscribe to and easily create AI music that will be mine in all legal aspects. It won't be exactly what I want, but neither is scouring the internet for acceptable tunes with questionable legal rights. I will also be more specific with which song plays for which scene (currently not the case). I will also try to add some more sound effects, specifically during the flashbacks and a couple of other sound cues that make sense.
I decided that the map is not a priority and I'm second guessing myself on the quality of it in its current state. It's definitely something that I want to include as an added dimension of Rackham City, but for now it is on the backburner.
I wasn't going to invest in any silly Christmas assets, but who can resist the joy of the season? Me? Nope. I'm quite keen when it comes to my own weaknesses. Curious, huh? I thought you all deserved something a little sexier than your common bearded north-poler.
Since it's sunday, I'll post a quick update. It's been a good writing week, but no rendering. I'll have everyone's holiday gift ready on the 26th (sorry, tried for 24th but that will not happen). So I will post an image on 26th and a proper case log on 29th.
Above is the final version of the book cover that will appear in the next chapter of New Antioch. The model is Gabrielle but with different hair. This week I finished scene 5 with slightly more renders than I had first anticipated for the scene. I added 30+ renders to the scene and I'm happy with the outcome. Holidays will probably offer an hour here and an hour there for rendering, but I'm going to start the coding and post work now (generally I do that at the end of rendering) so the chapter can be ready to release almost immediately upon render completion. I realized that I do not own any christmas assets, so we'll see what I do for a holiday member render.
I thought I could finish scene 5 and almost did this weekend, so I'm going to call this the 1/3rd mark. The main reason its taking a bit longer than expected is the hair asset for Detective Turis, which requires some finessing. 300 renders total, so some ok progress. Curiously no Daz crashes. Detective Turis helps Pecker out with the investigation that eventually takes us back to City Hall and Bellarosa's speakeasy later in the chapter.
I'm back! Managed a few renders for scene 5 and looking forward to continuing the journey. I'm comfortable with saying that scene 5 will be done next time I sit down to render. Currently I have 15 scenes planned for chapter 5. Which I think is about the right amount of content for a meaningful update. Hopefully a little quicker than the last one.
So RL job completed, and I have begun to render again. The billing pause will be broken on december 3rd I think, and I will keep it that way. I have a few days open to render, so next update will be a proper case log with a render from the current scene and I'll make it something special to make up for the little break in the action.
Not even going to use the "Case Log" as a title and it feels weird to post just text. The RL project is on it's last week, so I should be up and rendering shortly after that. This might be the most uninspired post of all time. I think I'll leave it at that.
My RL project has been as I suspected, a time sink. But I'm doing some cross promotions with a couple of other devs and the image above is for New Antioch. It's part of a noir book cover that will be in the next chapter of TheRedMyst's game. So I used an hour of my evening to make sure he got what he needs for the scene while he is doing his renders. I may be putting too much pressure on myself to accomplish everything I want Pecker PI to be for the audience and in a timely manner. I will keep the idea of that moving forward, but I might lighten up a bit on the demands on myself so that I can create the AVN I want to make. What that means for my patrons is simple, I'm not going to chase the deadline at the expense of the story. What it doesn't mean is that I will take advantage with slow production, just doing things at a pace that benefits the AVN. I really like the 3 month per chapter idea, I just don't think I can manage that with RL rearing its ugly head. I still think it's a good goal, but I will probably veer toward being true to my "vision" and not be too concerned about time. If I can. It's hard to balance because I want to deliver, and it affects the potential success of the AVN. Oh, what the fuck do I know?
Got started with scene 5 today. Don't know exactly how many renders. My goal was 100 for the weekend, but didn't hit that mark. Probably got to about 260 total. I booked a RL project that will take me away from the computer more or less entirely for 3 weeks, starting tomorrow, so I'm going to pause subscription charges as soon as I finish writing this. I think it's fair, you are supporting the development of Pecker PI, not the stand still:-) I'm going to hate to write this part, but there is no way I'll make the Christmas deadline. It was probably questionable regardless, but 3 weeks down isn't going to help. I will, however, post on sundays just not with images.
So the poll was incredibly helpful in illustrating that nothing is just a simple choice. Pubic hair didn't win by a hair and shaven didn't slide into first. So a dead heat. I'm usually not particularly concerned with pleasing everyone, but I think I will add some well groomed hair to some of the girls (let's say half) as a compromise.
This week I nearly hit the 1/5 mark on renders: 190 (or at least that is the current plan of approx. 1000 renders per chapter). Scene 4 takes Pecker back to precinct 5 to get a little moral support. I may have spent a little too much time fixing the textures on Johnson's uniform. I fixed the name tag, but didn't realize the shoulder patch said New York. Fixed that, but didn't realize the badge also said New York. Fixed that. Looked at the "22" that references the precinct, fixed that. Done:-)
This week I aim to finish some wanted posters up along with scene 4.
Cheers!
ps Just after posting pubic hair got another vote and actually did win by a hair. Same procedure as noted above will apply.
I'm personally not a fan of hair, but it struck me as curious that all of the girls are clean shaven (it's also been brought to my attention by members). I know the time period kind of warrants some hair, but there will never be ungroomed women. I started to look into what is available in terms of pubic hair, but thought I'd ask before purchasing. Just a simple yes or no question and I'll consider adding if majority is in favor.
