- Sep 20, 2018
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Lengthy post incoming. It's spoiler-free.
Please, don't post spoilers in the comment section. Many haven't played the latest episode yet.
General information
For you who have played the update, I hope you enjoyed it! It feels great to finally be able to release episode 6 to you.
A warm thank you to everyone for reporting bugs/typos that slipped through to release! It truly helps to improve the game. There was a patch (v0.6.1) for fixing some minor issues with the initial release, but nothing was game-breaking. Since the patch, multiple new typos and minor issues have been reported, but I'm waiting to see if anything worth patching comes up. If not, any additional changes will be included in the next major update (v0.7.0) instead.
Many of you are asking for an updated walkthrough and it will be available sometime after the $5 tier has gotten access to the patch.
For those of you in the $5 tier, or planning to pledge to get the patch, please note that the patch requires the Patreon base game to play the update. If you don't have Patreon version v0.5.0/v0.5.1/v0.5.2, you won't be able to patch your game. The Steam version does not work with the patch.
After every tier has gotten access to the game, new polls will start for episode 7. But I do have a new type of poll for you starting this weekend.
Episode 7 news
Development on episode 7 started during beta testing. The progress so far is:
575 static renders and 23 animations completed. The animation queue has an additional 19 animations waiting to render.
I've written about 30% of the content compared to Episode 6. I've yet to decide the scope of the episode. I'll keep you updated as always.
9000 patrons = Upgraded hardware
During release, I reached 9000 patrons. It's a huge milestone and I couldn't take time to celebrate it until recently. Thank you so much for your contribution!
Since I reached 9000 patrons I decided to do something big for the game and was very lucky to do so considering the circulating supply of GPUs.
All thanks to you, I've upgraded my hardware to the next-gen of GPU cards and I'm ecstatic about the gain in render speed.
I've measured up to a 173% increase in render times per PC. I see how my static render queue gets obliterated overnight and it's simply amazing. This will likely shift the bottleneck from rendering to manual labor. But to fully use the power of the new cards, I will use this gain to increase the overall render quality and animation length in future updates.
I will make sure that every main girl gets at least one extra-long animation in episode 7. You deserve it!
These cards have opened up new possibilities for me and for the game.
This wouldn't have been possible without your support and I'm happy to take any risks of this investment for all of you.
I've yet to see how this will impact my development cycle, but I can already tell it's going to be a fantastic improvement of the content in the game.
Once again, thank you!
2021 Patreon changes
With the new year, I will carry out some changes to the Patreon tiers, to improve the value for you as well as making my work easier.
Starting 2021, custom render orders will be selected from submissions from patrons in the unlimited $75 tier. Each month, there will be a post for the $75 tier where you can submit your wish for a custom render order.
At the end of each month, I will handpick 4 orders from this post to produce and publish them next month. Please note that there's no guarantee that your submission will get picked. However, the benefits of this are that more patrons will have a chance of getting an order made, I will have work waiting for me on day one each month and the custom renders will have a bigger variety.
The drawback of this is, of course, that the President patrons will lose the benefit they pledged for and it's not been a decision I've made lightly. But a lot of things have changed during the year I've been producing custom renders. My Patreon page has grown with ~7000 patrons since and it's clear that there are many out there who are waiting and deserve a chance to see their dream render come true.
I've been in contact with Patreon, to make sure that the tier reward is ok to do, and they have given me a green light for it.
I hope this will excite you about 2021 as much as it excites me.
I'll be posting the first post where you can submit your ideas in December, and President tier patrons will have their final custom render order in December as well.
Starting December, the President tier will be unlocked to become unlimited and it will, for the moment being, only exist as a tier for patrons wanting to show additional support.
I will open a tier for $150 as an additional support tier, too, since I've had patrons wanting to donate this amount and Patreon's current tier reward system doesn't allow for them to see the posts without having a proper tier.
Furthermore, I will be removing the Acting Lessons Lewd render sets rewards from the $15 and $75 tiers. When I offered them as rewards, I was being optimistic about the time I have available for extra activities. It feels bad to put a reward in a tier when it's not something that happens that frequently. I might still get around to producing these sets in the future, but I want to put that extra energy into the Being a DIK development.
To sum up, these are the tier changes, starting January 1st, 2021, at the latest.
$15 tier:
$75 tier:
- Removed reward: Access to small lewd sets of characters from Acting Lessons, 3 weeks after release.
$100 tier:
- Removed reward: 3 weeks early access to small lewd render sets of characters from Acting Lessons
- New reward: Each month, participate in entering suggestions for custom renders. 4 out of all entries are handpicked and produced for the following month.
$150 tier (New tier):
- Removed reward: You can order one render per month from Being A DIK or Acting Lessons.
- Tier becomes an Additional support tier, with all rewards from lower tiers.
- DIK President Discord role
- An additional support tier, with all rewards from lower tiers.
- DIK President II Discord role
I'll be posting the first preview of episode 7 before the end of the month.
Best regards, have a nice weekend, a huge thanks for the support during the release, and thank you for reading!
Dr PinkCake
As anticipated, I have my sexy, new, ludicrously cumbersome spreadsheet ready to go, and DPC gives us next to no numbers. Last week I estimated DPC was getting about 20.6 animations/week based on his 173% improvement comment. This week we see he has rendered 19 animations, a bit lower than calculated... but also exactly the number of animations he had in the render queue last week.
Today, the v0.6.1 patch was made available for the $5 tier. Please note that you need the full Patreon version (v0.5.0 up to v0.6.0) to be able to patch the game to v0.6.1.
This week I've been writing and posing animations while testing the new GPUs.
The speed is truly amazing and I've been increasing the length of the animations so far and also increased the render quality.
42 animations of varied length (1-20 seconds) are complete already.
I've estimated that the efficiency of these cards is 400 frames (or static renders), per day. 400 frames is equal to a ~13.3s animation @30fps.
Just as I thought, the bottleneck has thus shifted from animations to manual labor; including writing, coding, posing renders, post-processing art, and more.
When it comes to future updates, the goal for me isn't to stress and release them faster, but to include the content I want and increase the quality of the art.
If an update is released faster than usual, it's a happy bonus. Regardless, development has gotten a huge boost, all thanks to you.
Poll news
The winner in the poll for an extra wallpaper was Jill with the option front focus. I will order and include this 2D wallpaper in Episode 7.
In December, there will be new polls to participate in.
Walkthrough news
I will write the walkthrough soon and release it to the $15 tier. It should be ready sometime in early to mid-December.
Getting the development for episode 7 up and running smoothly takes priority at the moment.
Have a nice weekend
Dr PinkCake
This suggests that DPC wasn't actually doing posing work this week, he simply completed the backlog of posing he made earlier as a test of the system. So the good news is that this does seem to be much higher than previously, but I think DPC is going to spend some time on other topics (the walkthrough, writing and plotting for Episode 7 generally) before he gets down to a heavy posing schedule.
The bad news is what DPC himself says: he won't use this new speed to reduce the time between releases, he's going to add more content into the release instead. Still a net win for us, of course, but it won't make the wait any easier. At least for now; I could see this speeding up the overall game schedule if it allows him to complete the game in, say, 6 more huge episodes instead of 10 more medium sized ones. It will depend on exactly how he's plotted out the game.
Here's my graph of Episode 7 animation progress (too little information to say anything about static renders yet). As noted, this graph is based almost entirely on wild speculation and the (implausible) assumption that DPC is posing renders as fast as practical, so whatever you do don't take this as some sort of prediction!
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