I wrote a story for Kiss My Camera (Patreon)

We just finished with the release of a new version of the Golden Coast Saga, which means it's time for the release of a brand new Kiss My Camera.

It was a long 3 months of work on crucial game systems from the last GCS update. There is an unanswered question floating in the air recently: why are you working on a GCS instead of KMC? The answer is: I worked on neither but they both got what they need for releases. I worked on the engine's tech stack. It is not just about how to transfer the talking characters and animated scenes from the previous web engine to Unity. I made it at the beginning of the Year when we released GCS 0.1, that's not a big deal. But the real challenge starts when you try to scale all those systems and implement new ones without breaking everything. I make an engine to develop as many games as I want and the deployment should be quick and painless.

It took so much time from the start of the Year to this moment because of the amount of technical solutions I needed to test before I can implement them in the engine. Probably right now we have the most advanced engine for the point&click adventures in an open world and day cycle with completely animated characters and VN-like dialogues. Quests, dating, items, saves, inner gameplay systems like mc phone with scalable apps, and scalable mini-games. And most important: the engine's infrastructure. Scalable UI, modals, settings, builds, assets management, async loading, proper serialization. In addition to all these important things, without which you simply cannot start the game, there's a lot of sci-fi stuff which have never been implemented in such games. Everything is animated™ feature cost us around 3 months of tries and failures just to get it working properly. I spent 2 months developing my custom animating system just to throw it in the dump and switch back to Spine because low-end mobile devices are melting and crashing due to the huge video memory consumption.

Real-time lightning solution with normal maps? Yeah, it is cool but your Xiaomi red mi note 3 will give you 5 fps no matter how you optimize the shaders. Right now we have 5 generations of character animation rig just to get closer to the perfect solution that fits most essential features and will be easy to run on mobiles. When you're a pioneer in something, you have to go through all the mistakes possible just to make things that other developers get from the start when they use ready engines like renpy. All this research work needs to present you a bug free and well performant product that everyone will enjoy.

Now we have a stable character system that was tested in action, a stable engine that works on low-performant devices, deep quest system that was disinfected from bugs for a couple of release iterations, I have used neural networks stuff for a half-year to drastically boost my art, I selected the final art style and understand what should be animated in the first place.

Now we can assemble from all these parts a new version of Kiss My Camera. As I said previously, because of the amount of work we have done before, the new Kiss My Camera should be treated as a new game and it will be called Kiss My Camera: Waifu Edition. After the game will get enough content to release on Steam it will become just Kiss My Camera. Yeah, without waifus, but their analog :D

You may ask now. The GCS is a story-driven game with an open world, how we can use all of this in KMC? And that's the thing I tried to develop in the latest vision of what KMC may become in the future. Besides the fact that the web version of KMC was a sandbox game, it has some dialogues with characters inside. Honestly, after the fifth or seven characters I started to hate making these dialogues. As you remember, there in fact just were 3 motivations for characters of why they come to the studio, and that started to piss me off. I just can't come up with new ideas for dialogues from the first ten characters, they started to repeat themselves.

So in the new KMC, I decided to redo this. I wrote a story in 3 acts that will cover many ideas, locations, and characters in the way they fit perfectly. The story is about a human male protagonist who came to Hollywood with a dream to win this life. For sure the story will take place in an open world like GCS with a day and night cycle. Here's the sketch of the world map that you will unlock location by location:

So in addition to the sandbox mode that we all love there will be a story mode instead of repeating stories of why the girl came to the studio. The first release of KMC:WE will be about the 1st act and 4 first locations with around 8 important characters and 4 side characters that will have a little additional content but will not affect the main story. Almost all the characters will be well-known waifus. Commission characters will be possible too, they will be added as side characters.

Since everything is ready from the technical side, I think the release will be soon. Previously I planned to finish it at the end of the summer but life things are constantly changing and it may postpone as usual. For example, a month ago I moved to another better country to finally settle for a long time so nothing can distract me. This took almost a month to finish my move and continue to work.

Right now I am tired and burnt as fuck as always at the new release is done, but I'm very happy that now I can build my game as I wanted. Stay tuned for the content previews that I will post here, cuz now I will spend my time in Photoshop instead of looking at colored letters in the code editor 🤓