Dev Update - 3/20/23 (Patreon)

Hey friends! Hope all's well with you and yours. I had a bit of an annoying weekend. Some boner rear-ended my car and banged it up pretty good. So now I have to deal with that on top of filing my taxes, game development, my day job, real life, etc. So, kind of annoying! But hey, you're not here for that.

Over the weekend I also released a new Alpha build of the game to the $15+ tier, which features 950+ images. In addition to what's in that build, I have another 20-30 images either rendered or queued for rendering. If I had to guesstimate how far along I am, I'd say the chapter is 3/4 of the way finished. I have one big scene left to finish, and then a few small dialogue scenes around it. So, I'd expect a final render count of 1300~. But, I'm trying to sprint through the dialogue scenes with minimal render counts, to speed things up a bit.

Speaking of speeding things up, I've played with my Daz render settings a bit, and the actual rendering is moving along much quicker. For the last few updates I've been doing 5000 max iterations in Daz with a 95% convergence threshold. But, I lowered that to 80% convergence with the most recent batch of renders, and realized that nobody will ever miss that extra 15%. So, that has reduced render time dramatically without any appreciable dip in final render quality. You can see the results above.

In addition to the usual writing and rendering, I've begun assembling the game's various variables into an Excel sheet, noting all the possible variations, which chapter the variable appears in, what the circumstances were, etc. This makes my life easier in the short term, while also giving me the chance to review them and plan for some adjustments in the long term. Once this next installment (Chapter Four: Part Two) is complete and in your hands, I'll be turning my attention to redoing Chapter One, and overhauling all the code. 

This being my first game, I made some mistakes coding certain things, that I wouldn't make now. So, I figure that if I'm redoing Chapter One, there will be no better time to get everyone to start a new game. I know it's kind of annoying, and it's always worrisome when a dev starts talking about redoing stuff. But, it'll ultimately be beneficial to the game, making development way more manageable.

Besides that, no news is good news! Progress continues, and the final release gets closer by the day.

I'm currently trying to decide on a new poll to run.. Not quite sure what to do, though. Maybe I should run one to see which girl gets a little extra love in Chapter 5? Or I could do an outfit poll, those are always popular.. Let me know your thoughts!

As always, thanks for being here! Take care of yourselves, and thank you for your support!