Dev Update #22 (Patreon)

What a week. Not as busy as last week, but my day job still is keeping me busy during the week. Good news is that I have been making good progress on renders, despite having family events a few nights this past week (and tonight and tomorrow night too…). Got one of my larger scenes done, and several smaller ones. Things are moving along, not at the torrid pace I would love to deliver the next release of To Be A King into your hands super fast, but still at a good steady pace. It doesn't help that I keep adding renders to scenes.

We are getting into spoiler territory with these scenes for awhile, so the previews won't be so numerous. I still owe everyone some fun special renders, and those will come once things slow down a bit for me. For now, I want to make sure that YouTube videos still happen with regularity and that To Be A King continues to have steady daily progress most days.

It's that fun time of development where I just don't have much to report. The mountain of 1600+ renders is being climbed, day-by-day. And I definitely think these are some of the best renders I've ever done. As I do with every release, I'm challenging myself to try a few different things. I think you'll be very pleased with those results. One of those things is diving deep with dForce settings and weight maps. I've gotten some really nice results, and I plan to continue improving there. I learn something new about lighting each time too, so you'll see some adventures there.

I'm going to start taking a day off each week from render work starting this weekend. From here on out, my plan is to take a break on Saturdays. It seems like a weird day to do it, since I don't do this full time. However, this will give me an entire day to just relax my mind a bit - no render work, no YouTube video work, and no day job commitments. I'll likely be active on Discord on Saturdays, unless I have other commitments.

Final note from me. Below is a new progress graphic I put together in Photoshop. I'll update this once a week with my dev update, but I plan to throw it on the main Patreon page. That way everyone can keep an eye on progress for the next To Be A King Release. A few notes on the progress tracker. Renders, by far, are the most time consuming part of development, followed by the script. Coding isn't a long endeavor for me, and testing is usually a few days once everything else is done. The scene count progress is there to provide a total scene count. Scene breaks are arbitrary, so you might see something like 3 scenes remaining, but 20% of the renders left. Just means that those remaining scenes have a large amount of renders. Since this is a side project for me, you'll see the progress bars jump up some weeks and others not have a lot of movement. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. LOL

Until next time, have a great weekend! Enjoy the preview.