Development of version 0.1 (Patreon)

The picture above shows a screenshot of the very first scene I've created. I like how the lowpoly models look in ZBrush.

I made the first characters for the game in March 2018.  

Gradually, the characters were accumulating, and pieces of the story were lining up in my head. By May 2018, I had about twelve characters.

Development began on May 6, and then I naively set myself the goal of creating my first build in a month.

By mid-July, I had ~300 images ready, but I wasn't satisfied with their quality.  I could upload version 0.0001 and collect my $10 a month, but for what? 

I spent the end of summer and the beginning of autumn learning new things, trying to raise the level of graphics to a higher level.

At the same time, I was thinking about new features, new characters. That's when I came up with the young version of Lora. And now I think that I did not postpone the release for nothing, because otherwise the whole story with the memories and the sketchbook simply wouldn't have been possible.

I don't have a very powerful computer, so it took me a long time to create each scene.  I've been creating an office scene for about two weeks.

In January, I decided to remake one of the main characters - I didn't like how it looked on the finished images. ~ 150 images had to be made anew.

In fact, for the past year, every day, I've been thinking about new scenes, bugs, functionality. And every night of this year, my computer rendered something.

It took me another month to create a sketchbook -  opening, flipping through pages, built-in minigames and scenes. At the same time, I was developing a phone that I wanted to build into the narrative deeply.

A lot of time was spent on UI graphics. Whether it be the background for the main menu or the pictures in the sketchbook or phone screens.

The number of images, lines of code, lines of dialogue was increased.

I realized that I would never get my "perfect build", and I would postpone the release indefinitely. And the longer it goes on, the scarier it will be to show it to the public, because of the amount of effort invested...

90 percent of the details that I spent a lot of time on, you probably won't even notice. I don't know if this painstaking approach is justified. Or I just needed to do something in a month, without any troubles...

I know that this story makes you think I'm doing everything for an insanely long time.
But this year gave me an understanding of the correct structure of the work process, I created my own set of positions, emotions, enviroments, characters, clothes. 

I made the basis for expanding the functionality of the game in the future (phone and sketchbook).

With this experience, if the audience likes the game, I will be able to continue developing it faster.

Now I'm limited only by the power of my computer.