Development Blog #3 (Patreon)

This blog is a little bit technical. We had to shorten some sections down in order to not write a book. We could, but Helltaker wanted to be sensible about your time! We will be doing a Q&A developer stream where we can go into further detail with you.

We present to you Melody´s original body in Unreal Engine 5. Stay on the lookout for our demo video next week to get a glance on what you can expect in the game soonTM. 

A month ago Melody suggested putting her original model into the game.

Melody´s suggestion to change the Melody character did not come out of nowhere. We had previously been discussing this both internally and with her. There were also enough voices in both our and Melody´s community asking for being able to play the game with Mel´s OG character in it.

The production of “A nut between Worlds” started around 2 years ago with only 2 production members. The financial risks we could take on were a lot smaller and we had to simplify our approach in order to create scalable and reliable solutions.

On one side we had access to Melody´s OG model with a very complex setup and pipeline. On the other side, recreating Melody, meant staying ahead of the complexity curve and having full control over all aspects of the pipeline.

Back in 2020, with full pipeline control in mind, we ventured down the road of fully recreating Melody and developing our unique “hentai next gen” shading style as you have known it for the past 4 months.

Over the last month we faced many challenges to bring the OG Melody character into our game.

We made sure Mel looks sexy as frick and makes you want to c*m uncontrollably.

In other words:

• Removed baked lighting in textures partially
• Slightly aged up the breast and hip body elements
• Adjusted the hairs based on Melody´s input
• Reapplied our new clothing meshes to the OG Characters
• Manually quadrangulated and restored the OG Meshes
• Saved and rebuild blendshapes
• Fully reskinned the character
• Created a new rig in Blender
• Created a new shader

We are super hyped to present to you OG Projekt Melody in Unreal Engine 5!

When we set out to create A nut between Worlds, we spent considerable time developing our first shading solution. For the transition to Unreal Engine 5, we revisited the original solution and tried a new approach that should bring us closer to our visual target - Honkai & Genshin Impact. We are still reviewing this iteration of our character shading and are looking forward to your feedback!

Unreal Engine 5 is finally out and we have started working on transitioning the game into its next engine evolution! Unreal 5 changes quite a lot and presents us with new and exciting challenges. 

We also have an open poll running to make sure we know what hardware all of you are running, in order to adjust the game performance targets to match all major system generations.

We are still working on Alpha 0.0.1 and should be able to give you a build to play in the coming 2 weeks.

We want to address the Roadmap and make sure that we don't create wrong expectations. Let's have a chat!

Releasing a Roadmap always creates specific sets of expectations within the gaming community. We are aware of this and have noticed how much pressure even a “loose” roadmap puts on our team.

Big Bang Studio is as indie as it gets. We pretty much spent all our day in development, including the weekends. That said - to stay healthy (and not go insane) is our most valued goal internally. In order to stay healthy, we balance development quality versus development speed and sometimes this will lead to milestone delays. This means though, that we will be able to support development for the coming years, without breaking apart.

We value your patronage a lot! To increase your ability to review our developments progress, we will be introducing additional venues of communication.

This includes:

• More work in progress posts on twitter & discord
• The “patreon beta environment” or PBE game builds
• New Q&A and Developer Streams

We are looking forward to the coming month. If you feel we missed anything, stay on the lookout for the Q&A announcement in the coming week!