This week in the Forest! #17 (Patreon)

YO FOLKS~! Welcome to March!

Let's start with a word from Vixel!

3/1 weekly report

Made some bugfixes and updates to the earlier monthly build! Biggest bugfix is one to stop date conversations from playing for critters who are not currently out on their dates. The new builds replaced the February ones on dropbox.

Currently making a big optimization pass in the areas we need it most! The game actually uses the CPU efficiently, so no tune ups are needed there yet. Most of the current performance issues come from loading too many textures and audio assets all at once when it would be better to load them on-demand. (All the sex scenes, music files, and world backgrounds are loaded into memory all the time, for example!) Even though the game is pixel art, each sex scene has dozens of high resolution frames that are kept uncompressed for maximum visual quality. I'll be upgrading the movie player to stream one sex scene at a time and unload it from memory when it's finished playing. ^^

Here's a look, at all of the items in memory at a given time!

This is a visual tool to show the CPU load for each of the processes/scripts. We use this to spot if anything is demanding too much!

Also been doing planning for the save system rewrite (Will start coding that after the optimization pass!)

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On my side, I've just been hankering down on animation! 

What are these two so happy about? ;O

I just finished up animating 2 more loops! Got another 1 FOR SURE that needs to be done, but I miiiight do a second one... We'll see how much I can recycle/do efficiently. Other than that, I have the transitions to do (a good ways through the main one) and then the extra polish here 'n there. Also the BG needs some extra love...

That's all to say it's coming along :>! I've been slacking on animating (it's so easy to justify doing other shit that needs doing. Always something to be doing in game dev!) But I'm stoked to be making some serious progress on this.

I did a bit of writing fleshing out Maverick's story and Bucky/Augustus' date - but they aren't finished yet. Got some good direction though, so that'll be fun to polish.

But that's about it for me! Animation takes a good chunk of time!

That's about it for this week! 

I'll be posting some sketches 'n stuff in a bit here! I've been doing a lot of studies and figured it'd be good to show/maybe talk about.

Till then! Thanks for another month of support everyone <3!