Development Update #77 (Patreon)

Time for a progress report. A lot going on behind the scenes. The development progress tracker on Trello has some nice updates to it. I'm now at one of the longer parts for development this cycle, apart from actually setting up the renders - animation testing.

My thanks to all the lovely developers, and my beta team, for providing feedback and recommendations as I work through getting the hang of animations. Good news is that animations are, in some ways, a lot less of a pain than I thought they would be. My initial ideas seem to be good ones, and now it is just a matter of getting the hang of the tools and how things should look. Daz's animation tools have improved since I tried them out about three years ago. Nowhere near something like Blender, but good enough that I can see my setup times for animations improving and my mistakes decreasing over the next few development cycles.

Some have asked how I plan to use animations, and that's a great question. Obviously lewd scenes are going to get heavy animation use. I'll be relying heavily on longer animations (10+ seconds), and then those will be used with either static renders set around them or stitched together for a longer montage of a lewd scene. Multiple camera angles will also get some use. Apart from the lewds, I'll be using animations in the story to better convey action. Things like walking are going to get a lot of animation use, especially since they are relatively easy in Daz with some presets. Beyond that, I am sure there will be shorter animations used for transitions and any future action scenes with things like combat. My goal with animations is to avoid the 1-3 second looping ones, as I am not a fan of those. They almost always look too artificial to me. For To Be A King, I want the animations to be more cinematic and meaningful. Not sure I'll be there with Chapter 11, but I am confident we will get there by the end of Volume 2.

That does mean longer prep time for these, but my setup allows me to render these out without greatly increasing development time. Early goal is 25-30 animations per release (not including the main menu animation that will be a feature going forward), with an average of 10 seconds per animation. 4-5 minutes of animations doesn't sound like a lot, but it is comparable to other games with quality animations. Talking to other developers, animation setup time varies a lot, which is understandable. I do not want these to add a lot of extra time, but they aren't going to be quick either. Once you dive into these, you realize how many little things go into animations to make them feel natural. A little over a week in to working on them, I'm happy with where I am at and the progress I've made. Wish I had something to show, but still a bit too rough to share.

Good news is that I've purposely setup my test animations to be things that will get used in Chapter 11. That should mean that all this testing time saves me on the final animations for this release. Here's to hoping!

A top secret project also kicked off this past weekend. I like to keep these things under wraps, as I test a ton of things that never end up panning out. This one is sort of the "white whale" for To Be A King, and I'm pleased to be able to make another go at it. As with all of these longer-term projects, I have specific objectives and steps to go through to ensure I don't spend a ton of time on something that is not going to pan out anytime soon. It is fun to take a few hours a week now and dig in to these things. I always learn something that I can use elsewhere, and sometimes it really works.

Past that, the new music arrangements continue to get cranked out by my wonderful composer. His ideas are going to bring a lot more depth to the music, and I'm very excited to see how that all works. As I noted in the livestream, these music changes will go all the way back to Volume 1, once we get everything finalized. That should be ready when Chapter 11 releases, but we will see. The music and new sound effects are really going to flow better with the story now. Exciting times.

Still a lot of work ahead for Chapter 11, especially with the new things I'm testing out for this release. It is going to be a very large release, so at least you have that to look forward to. When all is said and done, I anticipate it being my largest release ever. There is a lot of story to cover, and I'm excited to get all of it to you as quickly as possible. Now I should get back to work.