Development Update #71 - The Winter of Our Discontent (Patreon)

This one is long, folks, so grab some coffee, beer, or wine with Aelinia, and have a read.

Never improve your skills, kids. It just leads to you spending more time and money. In all seriousness, it is nice to put into practice with Chapter 10 several things that needed some solutions/improvements. Don't worry. This is not me spending weeks to change things. Just spending a few extra hours as I go to get things improved. Hopefully you'll notice the difference when Chapter 10 arrives. There are more improvements on the drawing board that I won't be able to get to with Chapter 10. Some will come in Chapter 11 and others in some yet to be determined future chapter. More on that shortly. To Be A King is in a constant state of evolution.

I've been grinding on Chapter 10 in all aspects. Script, code, renders, and fixes. I'll be leaving soon for several days of vacation. My last actual vacation was…yeah, I don't remember. I am taking my laptop, and I am sure that I'll be spending at least some time doing coding or writing, but the family isn't going to put up with much of that. I'll be back in early November to my somewhat normal schedule.

Development marches on. I always wish it could march on faster, but it has not been terrible. Fall is always a little weird for my development cycle, and I wish I knew why. This fall is nowhere near the cluster**** that last fall was for development and in my personal life, but it also is not the smooth development cycle of summer. The good news is that I am not burned out, overly frustrated, or tired of development. It would just be nice to see things leave my to do list in a timely manner rather than taking twice as long as I expect.

Steam sales have drastically slowed down, as expected, but they still continue to do much better than I thought. We passed 9000 copies of To Be A King sold on Steam earlier this week. Quite an accomplishment, and I appreciate all of you who support me here, promoted the game, or bought a copy on Steam. Can't wait to see how the rest of the year goes on Steam.

I was extremely lucky and secured a couple of 4090s. I am now waiting for Daz to update their software to support them (thanks, dforce bug), but I'm hopeful that happens while I'm on vacation. The 4090s should provide close to a 2X boost over my 3090s, if Blender and Octane performance translates 1:1 to Iray in Daz. I was hoping for 48GB of VRAM in the new cards too, but that did not happen. I'll take a nice performance improvement, at least. The two largest consumers of my time are render setups and the renders themselves. Nothing else comes close. My render speeds are already excellent, but you can never be too fast, especially as I keep adding things that increase render times. Oh, and fast render times are extremely good for one other very important thing…which I'll get to in a few paragraphs.

Now on to a bit of bad news. Do you know why the only safe release date is "when it is ready?" Because development has a way of throwing new challenges at you. Weeks ago I finished the Chapter 10 script, read through it, added render marks and other code, and thought I'd take a very short break while the Steam launch was nearing, and the new project needed some attention. As you may have already read in previous updates, the script turned out to be nowhere near done. It was complete, had order, and I had even proofed it. Sadly, when I went back after a couple of weeks to it, I was unhappy with it. The flow. The content. Everything was just a little off. Well, more than a little in some areas. It did not help that I also reviewed my carefully planned outline and decided to shift some things there. If you were here for the fiasco that was Chapter 7's development cycle, we are not close to touching that madness. But Chapter 10, after two relatively easy chapters, is a new challenge.

Here's the good news. Chapter 10's script is DONE. For real. It is much better than what the "finished" product was a few weeks ago. Some renders are also DONE. The code is DONE. Even with significant overhauls there, it is done. However, not ALL renders are done. It's possible that things go very smoothly once I get back from my vacation and I am able to hit the original release date of November 15. But, as of now, I do not see that happening. It could, but the chance is small enough that I am announcing a delay of Chapter 10's release. Since I am not confident on a new release date, I am not setting a new one (yet). My hope is that the release is done, beta tested, and released before the end of November. But with the way this has gone, I cannot promise that yet. Especially with an American holiday near the end of November. I'll be back to grinding when I return from vacation, but you can only rush these things so much. I'd rather not have To Be A King's Chapter 10 compared to Cyberpunk 2077's initial release. Though Cronut driving that car would be badass.

Hence why I am giving you all the heads up of this delay before we enter November. Once I have a new release date I know I can hit, I'll post it here. As I said, this is not that nothing is done or there are major issues. Those script issues are in the past now. No major render issues either. Every two months for releases with 850-1100 renders is already a tight schedule, and things did not break well this time to make it any easier.

Now, a bit of good news to sweeten the sour news of this delay. I mentioned that I had improvements planned for Chapter 11 and beyond. Let me tell you about those. I am balancing my release schedule with improvements, and I know that, no matter how awesome some of these may be, you do not want them to delay releases by many weeks. With that out of the way, here's what I can announce as happening "soonish", likely with Chapter 11.

Let's get the big thing out of the way first. Animations. They are coming to To Be A King. Chapter 11 is when I hope to add them. From there, as I improve my skills in delivering those and raise the quality, I'll be adding them into older chapters. How far back? The plan right now is back to Chapter 8, but we will see. That will be three chapters to go back and add them to, assuming animations do make it in Chapter 11. That might turn out to be overly ambitious, but I would hate for them to be missing from part of Volume 2.

I've held off on animations for a LONG time. Animations in Daz are…terrible. Just awful to try and setup. Mercifully, I discovered some new ways to make them less terrible in Daz that does not require me exporting to Blender and setting up textures, lighting, etc. in there. If I had my own Puggy, maybe I would go that route. Since I do not, I'd prefer to stay in Daz rather than fooling with yet another software product. I think I have Daz animations figured out enough to make an attempt without adding weeks of development time or putting out something shitty. Here is to hoping that they happen in Chapter 11.

As far as other improvements that are coming either in Chapter 11 or very shortly thereafter, I have a few that still need prototyping before I can announce them. They might really suck when I dig into them, so best to not get anyone's hopes up. However, I will reveal one other one. I am going to be doing some custom outfits for the ladies here soon, complete with custom undress morphs. Together with the animations, I am hoping to add an extra level of sensuality and teasing. Animations and clothing are two things lacking in To Be A King, and it is nice to at least have a plan for solving those.

Finally, I need to clarify about the new project I showed off some ladies for a few months ago now. With To Be A King taking on a new expansive plan that includes at least a Volume 3 (and, if I'm being honest, probably more than that), I'm putting any work on that new project on the backburner for quite awhile. To Be A King will get improvements now. I won't be saving those for another game. Since you're here for To Be A King, I know this doesn't trouble you, but I wanted to make it clear where my time was being spent. To Be A King has my full attention until we are much closer to its finale. And here I thought Volume 2 would be it.

Now, back to work before I head out on this unfortunately (for development) timed vacation. I'll be posting my next dev update around November 10 to let you all know how things are shaping up with Chapter 10.