VN Ren'Py Alive [Development Thread][Back on Track]

[noping123]

It's been a wild road for me so far. I started by coming up with a rough idea of a story which I realized was WAY too massive to turn into a real project (especially a first one). I came up with 2 more, one of which I began working on. I wrote the story, worked on the script, did most of the coding, and teamed up with an artist... who quit the project after about a month. Oh well, these things happen.

Flash forward a month later, I've learned daz, and I'm back on track, doing it all myself. This is good and bad - good because it means this will definitely come to fruition at some point. Bad because I'm not the greatest at any sort of modeling or art, so the quality will be less than it could have been - still, I'll class it as acceptable.

Because I worked with an artist early on, I do have a bunch of renders he did that I'm using as reference. Reword - I'm almost completely copying a lot of them to start. I'll diverge as I go on, and of course he only provided me with renders for the first handful of scenes so I'll be on my own after that - but I am using a lot of his ideas and even the same enviroments and sets as him early on.

So what is Alive? Well, it's the title of the game. What sort of game is it? Story driven. My drive, my entire goal, is to create a good story, with well-written characters, and for me at least, everything falls secondary to the story - which is why I've decided to accept renders of a lower quality than I initially would have liked-- because for me, it's all about the story.

So what about the story then? I'm not sure how to accurately describe it without major spoilers, but I'll try. You follow the life of our unnamed MC, shortly after losing his job. You'll meet his friends (current and new), follow through a small, but important part of his life, and if you're lucky, you even might get laid. (That line goes out to a certain two-legged curmudgeon. I wrote that just for you. This wall of text is for you too).

Rather than explain I'll show a bit: this is the first render from the game. (Provided first, original artist rendition. Provided second, mine. Mine still requires a bit of post-work but it's good enough for now).

Original:


New (but not necessarily improved):



This scene takes place at the very beginning of the game - even without dialogue you can sort of see what's going on here. After this opening scene, the story picks up 2 weeks earlier. Without going into too much detail, the story is effectively following the point where our MC loses his job until the above scene, which is not quite the end, but fairly close to it.


As for my part, I redesigned the characters, but used many of the same props and sets originally used. Some are a bit different, a couple are very different, many are similar or in the case of the above environment, identical. Some stylistically different choices with the lighting (That's it. It's not that I'm bad at lighting, it's a stylistic choice. I promise), but mostly similar.

I am learning as I go with daz though, and getting better. Today has been an experimentation in dforce physics, whereas previously everything I'd done through morphs and mesh grabbing. As I go along I expect to pick up more and more things - and unfortunately this will probably make me go back and touch up the earliest renders I've already done since I'll realize "Oh I could have done this to make it better", but hopefully I can keep that to a minimum.

All told I expect the initial release to take between 2-3 months to complete. At the moment the initial release (The 1 scene prologue of which you see the initial render for above, and CH1 and CH2), is planned to have between 6-700 total renders, and between 6-7k words of dialogue. At my current rate, including taking time to learn new stuff and occasionally backtrack, and 2-3 months seems about the pace I'm currently going at. There are also 3-4 "animation" sequences planned. I quote animation because I'm not sure how I'm going to handle them yet - I have about another 100 renders to design, set up pose and render first, then I'll decide how to handle them. I'm not a huge fan of those 1 second animation clips - but otoh my experience with animations thus far tell me setting up anything longer than 2-3 seconds will take me a few days just to design, and then another couple days of rendering. So far I've created 3 seperate animations in testing. 1 of them came out well, but it was the shortest of the 3. The 2nd was decent, but not great. The 3rd, it was abysmal. I'll need to really get better at it if I plan on doing it that way.

I may end up going with pure static images instead of animations, but we'll have to see. I'd definitely prefer some animation, so what I'll likely do is attempt the first one I have planned once I get there, if it goes well then I'll go that route, if not I'll pivot from there and we'll see. If anything does increase the total dev time to 3 months or beyond, it'd be animations as that could potentially add another 300+ renders if I do it the way I want to, although I think 4 months is the absolute longest it'd take.

All told I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I'll get through it. So far I've completed about ~30 renders, although my pace has picked up significantly. My initial progress was slowed a ton just trying to learn what to do and what not to do, and how to do certain things. Also stuff like environment design was a lot more difficult than I originally anticipated but since I've figured all that out I'm moving at a much brisker pace. Of those 30, 10 were completed yesterday, I'm on track for another 10 today. I don't quite expect to keep that pace up the entire time, but I am shooting for 7-8/day total.

Finally I'll drop the main banner here, for comparison's sake.

First, the original:



And then my take (Again with the similarities. Also needs a tiny bit of post-work, most notably a sky).





He only provided me with 7 total scenes worth of renders, so those initial 7 will mostly be pretty close to the originals, after that I'll be on my own - luckily I already have ideas for at least the first dozen scenes. After that I'll have to figure it out, but that's over a month away yet, so I have time. All in all this project won't be a short one. It also won't be the biggest on the earth, but I'm at least trying to make it have some sort of content upon initial release. I never was a fan of "release 3 scenes and a bunch of "planned content" tags, and hope for the best".

 

[noping123]

Project back on track. I deleted the previous updates since they're entirely irrelevant and spoke to content and stuff that doesn't exist anymore. instead of making new posts for every update, I'm just going to replace those as needed. I'm going to maintain this for 3 reasons : #1 to look for some measure of feedback. (Note: I'm still going to go through with this even if the feedback is boo you suck, but hey. I'm doing this more for me than anyone else.) #2 to give me something to do when my PC is tied up by daz - I am sort of limited in my options during that time. #3 - Coding and writing I'm good at. Daz - not so much. This will serve as sort of a "where I was vs where I am" for myself once I'm much further along.

Oh, and #4 - because I want to.

 

[noping123]

So. I've been putting quite a lot of time lately into trying to produce these renders. It's going... well it's going. I'm not gonna say it's going WELL, but it's not going terribly either. So far, I've built (designed/posed/etc) about 100 total renders, although only about 70 are done, with about 30 currently queued.

Some days are more productive than others - for example today I managed to get a whole 4 done. On the plus side, this lets the queue catch up. Downside is I only managed 4 all day. I've had a few days like that, and a few where I manged to get almost 20 done in a day. It really boils down to what I'm actually doing.

Today I spent most of my time working on the intro scene for a minor character - Gabriella.

Before I started with the very first render, I designed all the characters - including outfits for the majority of their scenes, built most of the enviroments I'll need for the first release (I still have 3 minor ones I need to build, but they're minor and I already have the assets for them so I don't forsee too many issues, also they're still down the road a bit). Sometimes this works out... sometimes not so much, like today.

Originally I put together the outfit for Gabriella, and in a vacuum it seemed fine. In practice... well, not so much. Also, trying to figure out the lighting was.. challenging. Now I'm not the best at lighting to begin with, so it's often a struggle to get it to "acceptable". This, combined with the outfit I used originally, and well, it was an unproductive day.

So, I started by setting up the scene, and loading in the character and the preset I had made. I messed around for about an hour with the lighting until I arrived at something I could at least "work" with. Not perfect, but at least workable. At this point is when I began to notice issues with the dress. Now, it's possible the dress is actually fine and my shitty lighting is the real problem, but for now it's easier to try and fix the dress, so that's what I did. After about 10 attempts (the dress was originally red), I arrived with this:




It still just did not look right. so, I decided "Ok maybe if I try a different dress". I messed around with a bunch of different outfits/textures. About 30 attempts later and I had this:



Better, but I didn't actually like that dress. (With a different texture, and a different coloring it's actually perfect for another character which is where I'm using it, but for this character it's not right at all).

I spent probably the next hour and a half looking at every dress asset I could find online, but didn't bother with any of them since none were "right". At this point I considered going back to the original and trying to fix the issues with it - but first, one more thing I wanted to try.



Ok. Now we're onto something. This works. The color is wrong though.



Much better. Also added DOF because being able to identify the background isn't really necessary here and tweaked the lighting a bit. Now it was just a matter of making the small edits. Some pose changes, small edits to the lighting, and it was finally ready for the queue.


All of this because I can't do lighting well, and a dress. The entire process took about 8 hours for that one render. Compare that to 2 days ago where I completed 15 in that same amount of time.

Little by little I'm learning. I'm still very much winging it every step of the way, but at least it's getting a little easier. Tomorrow I'll be working on the rest of the sequence in this environment (which includes about 20 renders total, 5 of which include a small bit I decided to write in today which amounts to a dumb joke and a reference to another game). Now that I mostly have the lighting for this scene set up which is by far the hardest part for me, I'll be able to knock out all of that tomorrow unless I run into any unforseen problems, which I probably will but hey.

After that, the entire weekend will be working on attempting to build the next scene which includes the first planned animation sequence of the game (and yes, it involves the above pictured character). While stuff like the above has been a challenge so far, that is going to be my first REAL challenge of this entire project - attempting to build respectable looking animations. I plan on investing at most a week into attempting to build it all. If I manage it within that time frame, then great. If not, I'll just accept that it's something I'll have to figure out slowly along the way, and resign myself to just using static images instead. I'd rather do that than add in piss-poor animations with massive amounts of clipping or jerky movement or anything like that. Basically if I can't make them look smooth, I'll go to plan B.

Still, overall I'm happy with my progress so far. I've been at this for a little under 2 weeks, and I've managed to put together about 100 renders (and render ~70 of them), which is about on-par with the speed I was hoping for. At current rate I'll be done sometime in Nov. - although we'll see how the animation experiment goes first.

 

[noping123]

Well, I think I've decided to go with animations, as it just "works" better. That said, they won't exactly be high quality, but like the renders themselves, I've managed to figure it out to a point of "good enough", where I'm ok with including them.


My first animation attempt blew up spectacularly - as did the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. The 5th attempt was the first one that showed any promise at all.

View attachment test3.mp4

















That was originally 180 frames at 30fps - it felt too slow, so i sped it up x2, making it 3s instead of 6, then had it loop a few times. It came out "ok". That is not the final version, that was just a test one I did to see how it'd come out, but it is fairly representative of the general quality I'll end up having I think. Just in that alone I noticed 7 different things I'd want to fix before it was redone as a final version, but like I said it was a good enough test as "proof of concept" that I'm ok with it. Since putting that one together I've created 3 more (currently working on a 4th) each with different poses. Each one is between 180-360 frames - I may end up doing for some of them what I did earlier, speeding it up x2 or x1.5, but keep the overall amount of frames so it looks smooth enough. Because the gpu I'm using isn't exactly a beast, I've had to work out compromises on quality vs speed of rendering - that one (180 frames total) took approx 22 hrs to render. i went with 5 minute renders at approx 500 iterations ea, using built-in denoiser. I think it came out fine doing that (I wouldn't mind feedback on it, but my personal opinion is that it's "good enough". We're talking picture/video quality-wise here, not content).

Since then I've also experimented with various types of dforce, breast physics, and a few other small things to add a bit more to it. I do still have to go back to the above one and fix it, but I wanted to give designing the rest a shot first, due to how different (and how much more complex) they are. Since I've managed to figure them out mostly and get them looking halfway decent, I think I can invest another week into figuring out how to "perfect" them (well, as best I can anyway).

All told, given what I've learned, I think it looks like I'll end up with the following: Between 6-700 static renders, and approx 15-20 total animations varying in length from 3-12 seconds long, although I'll probably have them looped when in the actual game. (Looped until you choose to stop them and move on anyway).

Just in the time I've been writing this I've been experimenting - I've figured out quite a few other things to add a bit more realism to animations, so hopefully in a day or 2 I'll be able to put it all together and improve on the above - but I think it's a good start.

 

[noping123]

Wow. So, 10 days ago I said "hopefully in a day or 2" - thinking I'd have moved on by then. (Feel free to skip to the end for actual game info. Or read all about how I suck at daz first).

And I did. I finished up, rendered one of them, moved on.... then I got to a scene where I couldn't quite figure out how to do it. So, i decided to do research. Specifically, I loaded up other games that I knew did similar things, to see how it was done. I noticed 2 things.

#1 - it's amazing how many "top tier" games have clipping issues galore that no one ever notices - at least until you're looking real closely. #2 - the stuff I had done was pure dogshit. I mean, I never expected to put together anything great, but comparing to other stuff, it was really bad. So bad I scrapped it all, deleted everything, and started from scratch.

10 days later and I've finally finished setting up a handful of sequences that don't actually look terrible - a lot of that time was spent just trying something, realizing it didn't work, trying something else, rinse repeat. Plus side, I learned quite a bit in the process. Also plus side, the animations I've actually finished are significantly better than what I had done the first time around. Down-side, they're still not great - but I'm ok with that. I never expected great, I'll settle for acceptable, which is where I think I finally landed.

I have 1 more sequence to go with the first animation set, although I haven't quite figured out how I want to do it yet. After that I'll do the second one (Now that I actually know what I'm doing, sorta, I can knock out the entire sequence in a couple days as opposed to a week+). After that I'll finally be back to static renders for at least a few weeks.

I definitely expected to be about 30-40% done by the end of the month, and likely would have been if I didn't spend so much time figuring out animation, but now I'm more like 15-20% done, but happier with the results. I've also looked back at the static renders I've finished so far (approx 130 or so), and flagged quite a few to be fixed, mostly using a bunch of stuff I've learned since. It's not exactly efficient to be going back and re-doing work, but I'd rather do that than just say "meh close enough" and leave it.

I am a bit disappointed that in the last 2 wks I've only actually completed about 10 static renders, and 3 of them I need to re-do because I hate them, but the entire time was spent figuring out animation so I guess it's an ok trade-off. All in all animations take me approx 1 day to render each - so that'll be 2 wks of rendering just to finish those, plus another 3-4 days total building them all. (hopefully 2-3, but I'll assume 3-4). Static renders I can do about 10/day rendered. Sometimes more sometimes less building them, but since I currently have a queue of 20+, we'll just assume 10/day - I need about 600 more of those, so that's another 2 months. Then I have to finish up the coding, and I still will need to build a whole mess of 2d images (No clue how I'm gonna do that yet since my drawing skills are non-existent, but one problem at a time!). While I had originally hoped for ~novemberish, I think early January is much more realistic.

My biggest problem so far though, is my over-ambition. Right now I'm sitting at around 14 animation sequences I'm currently working on. There's also another bunch I will need to do later on, but those will come near the end, so it'll probably be around 20 or so. When I first started this I expected like... 3? Then I say to myself "hey I'd like to do this". Nevermind I have no idea how to do it, so it's a process and a half trying to figure it out. Then it doesn't work at all, so I go back to the drawing board, until I make it work. If I hadn't already done that about 7 times in a month, I'd be close to half done by now.


Now, I know no one really wants to read walls of text, people look at these things for pictures, actual info about the games, and release dates, not the ramblings of some random person. Still, writing all of this helps me collect my thoughts and helps me organize what I want to do and still need to do for this project, so I'll continue to type them anyway. Still, future updates will be more content heavy, as I actually will have content soon once I get past this ani-block. (get it? GET IT?.... yea fuck I know, I'm tired).


As far as content does go though, Here's what I can share about the story for now. The game is, as typical, broken up into chapters, each chapter containing 2 days. (This will change towards the very end, where atm the plan is 1 chapter will be 3 days, another will be.... more, but mostly 2 days per chapter). The initial release will contain chapters 1 and 2. The entire story spans approx 16 days, so 8 chapters total, my "plan" (but we all know things change) is 4 releases. It might end up being 5 just because one of the planned sets is pretty big, but that would make another small, so who knows. I'll figure it out a time not now. The story starts off... On a monday? Or tuesday? I forget, I have it written down - I've been doing animation so long I haven't actually looked at the script in a while, so the initial release covers that week into the weekend.

The initial release contains a few decisions that will be important later on, an introduction to the minigames which, while pretty simple are actually important to the story, at the very least the introduction to every main character, and the basics of the smartphone/text messing system I built in. I may never do much with the smartphone aside from the text system, but made sure it was set up so I could expand on it if I want to later on.

There are 3 total sex scenes in the first 4 days - 2 are mutually exclusive so it'd take separate playthroughs to get both, the other is missable. Now, this is what I want to stress - I'm not creating a jerk off game. There are tons of them around, and if that's what you want, go find them and have fun. I'm creating a game that tells a story, that happens to have some sex scenes in it. Some people enjoy that, some people hate it. I get it. And some people even create games that tell a great story AND have tons of sex in it too. That's not what I'm doing. The one thing I will never do, is try to please other people. I'm going to create what I want to make, the way I envisioned it - or at least as close as I can get. It might not be for you. That's fine. Based on the current story, and (barring any changes I don't currently forsee) each release will likely end up containing between 2-6 such scenes. My biggest worry with this game isn't about the animations (despite all the time I'm spending trying to learn how to make them decent), or the render quality, or anything else - it's that people will look at the story and go "this fucking sucks". If they do, I'll live with it, nbd, but if that happens, I'll consider the project a failure. If people shit on every single other aspect of it, but say "decent writing tho", then I'll be satisfied.

Finally, just for laughs, here's one of the renders I'm re-doing because I looked at it and.....




Seriously. Wtf was I thinking with that pose? Is he in a musical? A ballet? There are a handful like that where I just looked back at them and thought "What.. the... fuck."

 

[noping123]

Well. "A week" Turned into a month. I started animations sept 15th, I finished oct 15th. Well, "finished". I still actually have more to do, but they should be relatively quick. I must have gone back and changed and redone them about 30 times over that month - but when I finally settled on "final" versions, I redid them all from scratch and the entire process only took 2 days. (Plus another 7 days worth of rendering) - so the last few I have to do later will be relatively quick this time.

I do still have to "fix" some of the earlier ones though (and they're still not very good but whatever. I already admitted I'm not good at this). Here for example, I decided "fuck physics":


View attachment tonyadog.mp4

















That's totally practical and normal, right? Right? That's Tonya btw - originally I didn't care much for her, but she's grown to be my 2nd favorite character. Although she's a minor character, I'm toying with expanding her in later chapters. I did have plans for additional characters, (minor ones) that she could easily replace later on. I also layed some groundwork in this (rather long) series of scenes with her, for future appearances.

I did finally move back to the static renders, and idk if I'm just motivated or what, but I finished 50 in 2 days.... well, finished designing. I'm only managing to render about 15/day right now, and since I had a backlog of about 60 before I started, that will just keep going. I finished day 1 (finally!), and I'm about halfway done with day 2, which puts me 75% through CH1. If I keep up this rate of production (I won't), I'll have all the way through the end of CH2 designed in 2 weeks, and then it'll just be the last set of animations, and rendering. I'm sure I'll slow down or hit snags along the way, so I fully expect it to be about 3 more weeks of design, and then likely about 2 solid weeks of rendering.

I also forgot how much of a pita setting up renders can be sometimes. So, here's an example.



I was working on one set of stuff, and then idea was, she's tossing the bra down and she'll pick up the new one and put it on. (Apparently some idiot spilt coffee all over her shirt, so now she needs new clothes to wear. At least this idiot offered to pay for them).

Getting the clothes on the table to play nice was difficult enough. (This was one of about 50 quick test renders I did today). Eventually I got them all to get with the program, but that bra really bugged me - it looks fine - relatively neat and normal in the reflection. Not perfect - but good enough. But in her hand, it just looks like a mess. The big thing that threw me was the strap - it looks so close together and narrow in the reflection, but super wide apart in her hand. It bugged me - a lot. I tried changing camera angles about 50 times but it never seemed to help. Eventually I just said "oh to hell with it" - and changed the camera angle to actually clip her hand out, and only show the reflection. Problem solved, and I moved on.

Or was it.


Apparently sometimes I can be dumb. I forgot to save, and had moved on. By the time I was ready to call it quits for the day and just start rendering everything, I decided to go back to that one for a moment and check something.... which is when I realized I forgot to save it - so, I had to redo the entire thing. Ok fine, whatever.

Enter:



Notice how it's quite a bit different - and also how the hand is clipped out. The frustrating part here though is, in this version? The hand doesn't need to be clipped, because it actually looks fine. I didn't bother changing it since all the renders in this series use the same or similar camera angle, so I just left it. That particular shot I still feel like I want to change some stuff up, not sure what yet but it still feels "off"... I have about 4 days or so until the queue starts to catch up to it though, so I'll not worry too much yet.

This btw - is Nikki, one of the main characters in the game, and who could probably be considered the "Main LI" (one of 3 really). Ok maybe spilling coffee all over her shirt wasn't the greatest start, but what better way to make it up then with a new wardrobe.

All together so far, I've completed 136 renders (with about another 100 in the queue), and 14 animations (including the one above which I need to fix I think.) About another 600 renders left to design plus idk how many animations left (I'll figure it out when I get there, but it's likely to be between 5-9). I've already flagged 7 renders for redo (Not terrible tbh), and every day I wake up to a bunch from the queue done, I end up tagging like 2-3 from it, so in the end I'll probably end up with around 100 or so I'll need to do over again. That's not awful and I'm sort of ok with it. That will be an extra ~4-5 days of 24/7 rendering, plus a day to fix them all, so an extra week, but I sort of baked that into my expected time already. I don't want to go back and fix any until I'm done, because once I start working on a scene I get into a groove real quick and can design a bunch in one shot - if I'm bouncing around fixing old ones it makes it harder to establish a groove for new things, so I'll just do it when there are no one ones to design.

The good news? All this stuff I'm trying to do now? I can just do it, and keep working at it until it looks halfway decent - I'm officially past the point where I have to google "daz3d how to do stuff I want to do" - so that's nice. I still can't do it WELL, but at least I know how to now.


Oh right, tonya. Well, here's 4 renders from her series. 2 of them have been flagged to be redone, 2 of them are "Ok". I'll let you decide which is which.











So, a couple posts ago I showed one quick series of test renders of Gabriella, at a club. At some point very early on you're given a choice to hit the club, or not. If you decline, you don't meet Gabriella, but you run into Tonya instead. I thought I'd prefer Gabriella, but as it turns out I definitely prefer Tonya. Still... some of her work definitely needs to be fixed. Oh well. I never expected any of this to be perfect, especially not for my first time.

...... It's definitely not her first time though. Damn girl.

 

[noping123]

So, I went back and forth on this a lot, but I've decided to entirely change up all of my plans and schedule for this game.

The initial plan was to finish CH1 and CH2, release them together, and then continue to release 2 CH at a time (likely 4-5 total releases). I've decided to completely abandon this, and release each chapter seperately one at a time. A couple of reasons for this:

#1 - I'm spending a LOT of time on this game. I don't mind it at all, and I'm mostly enjoying the process, but it IS a large time investment, and I *DO* have other responsibilities. I haven't quite gotten to the point of neglecting them yet, but I could see a world in which that happens if I continue my current pace. No matter what happens my intention is to complete this game - even if the entire world hates it, I don't, so it'll still be finished. Doing a smaller (but earlier) release, allows me to sort of gauge actual interest. If interest is strong, I'll likely continue at my current pace, which would equate to approximately one chapter release every 1.5-2 months. If interest is weak, I'll probably slow down considerably, making it closer to 1 ch every 3-4 months. Basically if enough people are interested in it, I'll try to push out new content as quickly as I can without making it complete shit, but if no one really cares, I'll relax how much time I spend on it, and just release at a much more relaxed pace. While I do enjoy the majority of the work, I realized my main motivation for spending so much time on it was to release asap - which only matters if anyone else but me cares. If no one does, there really is no reason to push so hard.

#2 - The majority of time I've spent lately has been on Daz - and honestly I just want to be doing some coding and some writing again. It'd have been a waste of time lately, since all of CH1 and CH2 are already written, and all of CH1 and most of CH2 is already coded - but there is a lot of "postwork" in the writing and coding areas that needs to be done - but I needed all the renders first to make it all work. Splitting things up gives me a reason to break now and go and do all of that other stuff and get all the coding ready for a release, plus fix up the writing a bit, (ofc all the "touchup render stuff that needs to be done, but thats not a big deal).

Doing it like this not only benefits in the above 2 ways, but I originally started this project with a partner before it became a solo job - so I did most of the coding and writing while someone else was doing the daz stuff. Since I had to do all the renders myself from scratch, any sort of workflow was sorta thrown out the window. Starting from CH2 on, I can produce a decent workflow/checklist system to try and organize things, and get it all done more efficiently.

While I won't be making any changes to CH1, it also allows me a little more time to expand CH2, and add some stuff I sort of wanted but eventually considered to be "too much" to do in 12 release. I'll end up adding a few things I wanted to anyway to CH2, including a few extra animations and scenes, and some expanded interactions with some characters.

Also the original plan for the MC was to have him be.... definitely not a blank slate, his personality should be pretty set in stone from the start, but one that could be influenced by decisions through the game. Some of this (Not all, but some) sort of got shifted to the wayside to make time for more important plot stuff - breaking it up gives me more of an opportunity to make sure that stuff is included going forward.


The end result is this: CH1 is mostly done, so I should be releasing it within the next 2 wks. I have to re-do (fix) a handful of renders, design about 30 more and fix them up, tidy up some animations, fix a bunch of the code, set up the main menu banner, tidy up the writing a little bit (which will happen as I'm fixing up the code), and create the UI for the phone. Thus far I've used a piss-poor placeholder, so I'm going to attempt to build something that isn't shit.

The downside is that each release will contain less content than I had originally planned/hoped for. The upside is releases will be more frequent, and overall there will be more content per chapter than originally planned. It also lets me decide if it's worth putting so much time into it, or if I should make sure ALL of my other responsibilities are handled first, instead of "Actually I can get away with doing that tomorrow..."

I know this thread has been pretty shy on info about the game, but this has been more about me documenting my process/progress, and thoughts on it, as well as a vent, than anything else - so to the 5 people who actually read this, feel free to check it out in a couple weeks then either praise it or shit all over it.