DevLog: v0.17 Concept Overview (Patreon)

Heya,

So I wanted to jot down some thoughts on the next update because I know the first question on everyone's mind after an update is "when's the next one?" So here goes an overview with some personal thoughts, reactions, and just an overall preview on what to expect with the conclusion of Chapter 8 and v0.17.

Outline Status

First off, those of you who stalk the Patreon page Overview (you know who you are) may have recently seen a jump in the progress for the outline. To catch newer folks up, we did a large portion of the outline for v0.17 at the same time we were outlining v0.16. Not only do these updates go together but there was a considerable amount of stuff that goes into v0.17 that has to work. It was imperative to work on major plot points for v0.17 far before we even started writing it. In fact, I'll even publicly note that there are parts of this update that were planned since v0.01, appearing in my original handwritten outline for the game and actual development for this update began about 6 months ago, running parallel to the past few updates. There's also prophetic hints at the events of this update scattered throughout the story. 

Assembling the Team

Right now, our outline clocks in at 10 pages long for v.017 and is the biggest outline we've ever attempted. This is also going to be the biggest team-based update to date. As previously stated, the beach was supposed to be included in the last update but when this puppy comes out, you'll soon understand why it wasn't. To squish it into the last update would have forced us to rush it and the beach series of scenes needs adequate time. This thing is a fucking monster and I have no idea why we've brought this on ourselves. I'll be putting out a formal post about the team specializations later but basically I'm tapping in Blayke to help with more writing and tapping in Jordyn to help me with CG creation more than in the past. Lazy-Jayke has spent months working on other aspects for this update including animation and set building that we'll probably drop some hints about later. 

CG Quality

I know some people were tweakin' over the change from .PNG to .JPG in the previous update to reduce the size. While I've posted images to show the differences between the two (for those of you who can actually see differences between the two), we have another fix coming down the pipe that should allow the naysayers to sleep soundly that image quality will not only be consistent as before but will actually increase in the coming update. I'm going to do a detailed post explaining this later but essentially we're going to start rendering images in UHD and then shrinking them down from there. Early tests of this actually will allow us to keep the smaller image size but increase the quality over the previous PNG quality from the 6 gig version of the game. Basically, this should let us clear up some of the noise (the fuzzy looking parts in the shadows) more than before. More details on that in future ramblings...

Custom Scene Quality References in v0.16

We warned about some quality changes in some of the images during the last update. These shots are mostly exterior shots of the dorm building and campus while we try and get Daz3D (our static image program) and Blender (the animation program) to play fucking nice together. Last update was practice because Lazy-Jayke built our beach setting for this update from scratch in Blender and we really needed to test our limitations because we'll be using both programs together for like half of the update . Our problem was trying to import the Blender scenes into Daz so that Lazy-Jayke wouldn't have to create all the beach CGs with the different quality that we saw back in v0.16. The quality isn't bad, it's just different, and it's something we were concerned about in the last update. On the break, we were able to get them imported and are still working out some kinks with it now, but it's looking promising that we can restore the consistent image quality you've seen without being concerned about the different look seen in some of the v0.16 exterior images. So we're please to say that we've made some progress on importing the custom scenes into Daz. While it takes added time to make these settings from scratch, it gives us options for the future. 

Personal Thoughts on What to Expect

So this is one of the updates I've been waiting for. One scene in particular, since the beginning of the game. It's massive, it's even more ambitious than before and I have absolutely zero idea how long this one will take. I'm also more terrified about this update than any previous one because it's more of a rollercoaster than anything we've seen in the story yet. It's probably going to be one of the most fun updates while simultaneously being one of the most controversial. Everything will change after this one.

I'm excited to have more group involvement in this one than ever and will openly admit that alone, this update would take me probably 6 months. I simply can't do it without these guys and this one will probably take everything we have. Writing has officially started so we'll see how it goes. I'll also say that the progress bar on this one may be inconsistent for a bit because I'm going to be writing my scenes out of order to allow for more time to go back and edit certain parts. This may be more difficult to judge progress on so expect that percentage to fluctuate a bit more than usual. It will also be moving very slowly in comparison to other updates because of the size of this one. But--keep in mind, i'm sharing the writing more this time so that should help compensate.

Imma shut up now... this shit long as hell.

<3 Aaryn