VN Ren'Py Color of My Sound - Development Journal (Release Date Announcement!)

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #12
-Poll discussion and bedrooms-

Day 27-29​

Didn't plan on doing an entry middle of the week, but I made good progress on two sets and I want to share them. Before that, I want to talk about the poll. I'm honestly surprised by the results so far.

I originally started the poll to gauge public opinion on MC's face in VN in general. I personally am more into immersion, some MC I can deal with, but if I don't like the look of the MC, it kills the experience for me. Naturally, I prefer "No face" as that is the safer bet if I didn't get to design it, otherwise, "Face but only rarely" would be my second pick. Only three picked "No face", just over 50% picked "Face". I guess not as many people share the experiences I have with VNs? With that said, the options are deliberately vague, since there are no metrics to determine how frequent is "rarely" nor did I explain it anywhere, and if it was a choice between Face or no, people prefer Face. Not to mention I have no idea if the design of the MC has any influence on the poll choices. Still, it doesn't change the plan, fortunately, as it always was Face except during sex. Sure, most dialogues would be in PoV, but not having to hide MC's face during other shots is nice. Takes more time to pose, but also takes less time thinking of clever ways to hide it.

Bedrooms​

Every set in Colours is an extension of the story and the characters. Bedrooms being the most personal location of its owner, I feel compelled to put even more effort into every bit of detail of the set. The sets will also be reused the most out of the rest, so that helps justifies the time and effort, but it also means they are the most creatively draining. I've completed three out of five so far and I already feel a bit drained. I know some devs feel it is acceptable to just use a premade scene, and as a player, I didn't care, but I couldn't do that to my own characters, not when I have the power to do what I think is right for my own game. So as always, I'll just take a break from it and work on something else next week.



I completed this set a week or so ago, but originally I didn't think to use it for the VN. The set was made because I felt the impulse to make a random naughty render, then one thing led to another, this is the outcome. Given it was done on a whim, I'll probably need to tweak it a bit more before production, but the foundation is there for easy customizations. This is the MC's room. Given the Sci-Fi setting, I felt the MC should have the most "generic" room, one that fits the best with the rest of the outside world, but malleable enough to changes as the MC grows as a character.



This is Elise's room. Since she just moved in, there's not a lot of personal items, but I think that helps accentuate her tendency to disorder, or maybe she was in a hurry to get rid of her clothes. I'll let others decide what happened. I was also testing morning fog, definitely overdid it, but that's what test renders are for. I also notice after the fact that the two renders I've shown Elise in she's sleeping... I think I should present her in a more interesting light next time...



This is Lana's room, and she will be sharing it with Blanche for a little while. What better way to add some character to character tension by forcing two opposite personalities to be roommates. I definitely did not do this because I'm not sure how to design Blanche's room. Lana was adopted into a family that ran some form of neo kabuki theatre troupe, hence the Japanese aesthetic. It just feels like something is amiss in a Sci-fi / Cyberpunk setting and VN to not have some Japanese influence in it. Then there's Blanche being so out of place is just icing on the cake. Yup, I definitely didn't do this out of convenience.

Thank you for reading, I'm still doing an entry on the action set this Thursday. For now, I still have just four more core sets to go, then it is just transitional sets. After that, I can start pumping out renders. Cheers.​

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #13
-Bedroom, Hideout and Posing-

Day 30 -32
​

This week has been one of my most productive weeks so far. I have now completed all the key sets of Chapter 1, and I have picked out the assets I'll need for the transitional sets. I still need to invest some more time going over everything to make sure they are good enough before I start production.

Hideout​

This is where the combat scene of the chapter will take place. A lot of time has gone into preparing the set for production. From my experience producing the sex scene, I need to organize objects into different groups to make it easier to switch them on and off. It speeds up rendering time, and allow my hardware to handle multiple figures at once. I also had to kitbash and place clutter carefully to make sure there's sufficient lighting and objects to support as many camera angles as possible. This is the hideout of a lowly gang, and I thought abandon warehouse just seems to make the most sense. There weren't any warehouse assets large enough to serve as a hideout for a gang, so I had to kitbash one together. Good thing is, it means the set is as customizable as I need it to be. I also made it as dark as I can so when the blaster fire starts going, it won't be too bright.

Bedroom


​

Mireille's bedroom is the final one for Chapter 1. I wanted a higher class, modern aesthetic that would fit well with corporate agents like Mireille. There's something luxurious and ostentatious about a room with split-level and plenty wasted vertical space. To cope with the stress and pressure of being an agent, Mireille likes to take baths to wind down. The bathtub is an important item in this room, she requested for one to be fitted right in the open. Being an agent, Mireille also has a lot of stuff swept under the rug, so why not put something personal of hers literally under a bedroom rug? However, the most important item and the centrepiece of the room is actually the sofa, it doesn't really fit well with the rest of the items, but it is also suppressed when the brightest light is diverting attention to the bathtub instead. I also wonder what Mireille is looking at?

Posing
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Now that most of the sets are done, posing is probably the next most time-consuming part of development (besides rendering time). With much of my time this past month spent on building sets and designing characters, I haven't put in enough time practising posing. I also still need to work out how to do melee fights well. So I've been challenging myself to pose and render in limited time frames, just to see how fast I can push myself. The challenge is to do posing, camera work and render an image all within 30 minutes. The resulting renders aren't very good, but now I have a better instinct for manipulating limbs and face. Here's some of them.






Thank you for reading. Next entry I'll finally get to melee combat. Cheers!

​

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #14
-Melee-

Day 32 - 34
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Didn't get too much time to work on the game since the last entry, needed a bit of break before I go all in again. I did get to render 2 marquee renders for melee. It was something I've never done before, it's just not the same as any other renders I've done. I post-process most of my renders, but they were never a necessity, they're just for polish and flair. This is different.

For the DAZ part of the renders, posing and camera were the most important aspect. I really want to convey the kinetic impact of melee combat. If you watch a slow-mo or still shot of the impact in real life, you could see the force ripple through the victim of the hit. That's not something really doable in DAZ, at least I don't know how. So all I can really do in DAZ is pose it as best as I can, and compose the shot for maximum impact. Even then I find it to be lacking, there's not enough to convey the force, the motion and the tone. Fortunately, I foresee this when I was building the set. I've been playing with god rays for a while now, but they were never essential to the sets, I've been practising it because I know I'll need it for the Hideout set.



This one is a bit of a failed attempt at utilizing what I have learnt so far. I had an idea, but the execution wasn't quite right. I wanted the god rays because I know I need dust, and I need something to fill the background. The dust is there to help accent the impact and motion, dark and dim background to keep the focus on the subjects and action, and the brighter god ray helps light the background to balance it out. I ended up over-exposing Lana's face since I placed her directly in the path of the outside light that creates the ray. Things got further complicated when the shadows on her face was just a mess with the other subject blocking much of the said outside light. So I needed two fill lights to get the shadows I want. That of course exasperate the exposure issue. Then there's a problem with ratios. There's a bit too much background for my liking. I want to keep the focus on the impact of the block, but also keep the faces of the subjects in focus. There are too many things wrong to list. Still, I think I learned from it, for the second one I'm quite happy with.



This is more like what I envisioned. The composition is so much better, the post-processing is a lot better, and the camera angle is just more interesting than the first one. I got the colours I want, I limited the god ray to only where I need it, and I only showed what I needed and kept things simple. There are still little details I can improve on, but I say that for every render I do, I need to stop stressing myself over it. I just need to make sure I can reproduce it for the other poses.

That's it for this week, thank you for reading. I'll continue my break from the game for the rest of the week. Once I'm recharged, I'll start producing actual renders for the game. Cheers!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #15
-Production-

Day 35 - 37
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I'm back from a week-long break. Over a month I've been prepping production, I've finally started on it this week. So far I finished 19 renders for a scene and used 9 older placeholder renders I did weeks ago to put together the start of the VN. It's not exactly long but it gives me a rough estimate of how long chapter 1 would be. So by that estimate, including the H-scene renders I did, chapter 1 will include about 450 renders and 16000 words. I can't use this week's pace as an estimation on how long it would take me to render the rest, but I'm hoping I can do 10 per dev day. Still a long road ahead of me.

I'm considering releasing a demo to gather feedback, but I don't know anyone will be interested. Send me a message or post here if you are interested.

Otherwise, there's not much to say. It's been pretty smooth sailing so far.





Thank you for reading. Unless there's something interesting to say, I'll just do a progress update next week. Cheers!

 

[osanaiko]

Gallant Trombe I would absolutely love to try a demo of what you have so far.

Actually, I do alpha/beta playtesting and editor/proofreader service for several developers on this site. So far I've worked with i11uminati Productions, GrayTShirt, Basilicata on released games and a few others who have not released to the public yet. So far most of them seem pretty happy with my efforts I don't ask for any costs for the work, just ask that you mention me in your game credits

If you'd like me to do playtesting and/or proofreading etc then please send me a PM.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #16
-Progress Update-

Day 38 - 41
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Gotta go fast. This week has been all about speed. Last week I completed 19 renders over two days, which was not fast enough. At that rate, I'll never finish Chapter 1 within a reasonable time frame. This week, I finished 46 working my normal 4 days per week schedule. Slight improvement, but still not where I want it to be, at least for Chapter 1. This leads me to another problem.

Chapter 1 is a lot longer than I initially predicted. It has a total of 42 scenes + smaller transition scenes in between. Obviously, every scene varies in size, but the average renders per scene I now estimate to be 26. Now I'm hitting myself in the head wondering how on earth did I think 450 renders was enough in the first place. Mistakes were made, most definitely. So, the question now is what am I going to do about it.

One thing for sure is I don't want to finish all 42 scenes without getting a sufficient amount of external feedback. I can be as confident as I want of my own abilities and product, but it's an unnecessary risk I'm taking. I think the wise thing to do is to release it earlier, get as much feedback as I can, and make necessary changes before it is too late or too time-consuming. So, for Chapter 1 at least, I'm seriously considering splitting it up into 3 parts. I didn't write the chapter for that kind of releases, so each part will most likely end abruptly, but that's a trade-off I have to accept. It also means the sex won't come until the end, which also sucks.

On a more positive note, I'm pretty happy with what I have so far. Very likely I'm going to have to go back and add a few more renders to accommodate any rewrites in the future, still, that's to be expected. The good thing is writing the scenes have been a very smooth ride for me. It only takes me half a day to finish writing for the renders I've done that week.

Right now, it took me about 20 minutes to read through it. If I scale that up, even when split into 3 parts, there's still a pretty sizable amount of content per release. That was always an objective I've set for each release. I want them to be meaty and worthwhile every time. The last thing I want is for people to download an update, only to finish it in less than an hour.

Now, here's my usual preview of what I have done this week. The 30 out of 46 renders have been for 1 scene. This scene introduces a very important character to the story arc. For that, this is the first real production test for me.



In my opinion, an important character means they have a big role in the plot, themes, setting and influence on the protagonist. That doesn't mean they will always have a lot of screen time, so any scene they're in, I've got to nail it. I don't want to spoil the story in previews, so I'll leave it at that. In terms of renders, I'm happy with them. The prep work I spent a month on really pays off now as each render doesn't take long to get ready for baking. The lighting for each camera and its various angles are done beforehand. So, posing and small tweaks are all I need to do per render. If only I have better hardware, I wouldn't have to push myself that much harder to make up for the lack of it.



This one right here is the render that took the most time to pose, but even that wasn't too long. The only challenge was getting the clothing to deform with the fingers, but I lucked out as this asset was pretty easy to work with. If anything, the hair is by far the worst part. If I could, I would have picked a different hair for her.

Thank you for reading. Next entry I probably will talk about "choices" in this VN, which I think is a pretty contentious topic in the world of VNs, so that's going to be fun. Cheers!

 

[Bagley]

This game sounds more and more awesome with each of your updates. I can't wait...

View attachment 1227317

View attachment 1227321

Oh, and she's absolutely gorgeous!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

This game sounds more and more awesome with each of your updates. I can't wait...



Oh, and she's absolutely gorgeous!

Thanks! I'm really happy with how she turned out too

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #17
-Progress Update & Choices-

Day 42 - 43
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I want to do a mid-week update on my progress since the last entry, at this point this is my way of taking a break during development days. I went from creatively exhausted just trying to render one scene, only to end up pumping out renders for another. In other words, I rendered 8 images on Saturday, and 31 on Sunday. The consequence of just brute-forcing my way through a scene is that I ended up losing concentration and making mistakes everywhere, resulting in having to redo a lot of renders on Saturday. The source of the problem I think is the lack of inspiration I have for the scene, I didn't know what to do with it. I know what I need to tell from a story perspective, but I didn't have any good ideas to make it interesting.

The scene after is finally the scene I get to introduce the main love interests, and that's where I'm full of ideas. So far I've been working on very serious scenes, now I get to have a bit of fun with the characters. Also, I like the girls. It would be a failure as the creator if the girls in an adult harem VN aren't my "waifus". Got to be a fan of your own work to get the best of out it.





Colours is all about intrigue. I want people to suspect any of the characters they meet. Everyone has their own motivations and machinations. People can lie, and they will lie in Colours. Just because they flirt with you, admire you, praise you, even have sex with you, doesn't mean they are loyal and in love with you. This is especially important in a harem. It's not worth anything if one didn't earn it. I think the best harems are the ones the MC actually earns and win the hearts of the ladies by his efforts and genuine affections. The MC is set up to be the "centre of the universe" of the story, which means all the good AND bad orbits around him, don't expect good things to be handed to him on a platter.

Choices
​

I've briefly talked about choices in Colours before, now that I have started production I want to elaborate a bit on it. I've seen "meaningful choice" gets tossed around a lot here. I don't think it matters at all in VNs. To me, VNs are just another storytelling medium. Player interactions don't necessarily make a story or experience better. The real issue is the trade-offs. Even big-budget games made by experienced developers of the genre don't always nail the implementation of meaningful choices in a game. From a developer POV, making choices that matter is a very expensive effort. As a solo developer, making my first VN, I simply can't afford it. This is one of the things I have to concede as impractical to make, not if it hinders everything else. I want to produce high-quality work, as high as I can and as consistent as I can. There are ways to make choices at least a net positive to the experience without taking up too much time.

I think a common issue with choices is that people feel disappointed when they are given an option to pick something, what happens on screen didn't reflect it. The whole point of choices is so that players can personalize their experience. In a linear story with no significant branching paths, that's not really feasible, not in a meaningful way anyway.

So in Colours, instead of forcing branching paths into the story, choices are there to custom tailor the MC in a variety of ways. Ways that can be tracked and reflected during appropriate moments. Here's a real example, the player will be given an option to name their MC as per usual, except this isn't an out-of-game choice, this is part of the story. The MC is actually given an opportunity to stick to his old name or give himself a new one. Obviously, I have no idea what name people will pick for their own MCs, and there's no way to know if it is old or new just base on what they type. So, the players get to declare which is it. From that point on, whenever appropriate, characters will reflect this choice.

Spoiler: Old name

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Spoiler: New name

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For spoiler reasons, I'm not going to show the rest of it, but the conversation changes based on the choice you've made. Now, this is of course very minor. However, this also means I can do a lot of these. Over time, with enough variables, these little details I believe will add to the experience. I think if characters can remember the little quirks of the MC, people will appreciate these little differences.

With that said, there are branches in Colours. While they will all converge sooner rather than later, just like the minor flavour choices, characters will reference them for the rest of the story. There will be unique renders made for these branches and their consequences as well.

As for endings. There will be key choices that will determine what endings you'll get. I've planned out an epilogue that will sum up many of the minor to major choices, and also secret "True" endings that will take all the correct choices to unlock.

Finally, routes of each love interests. Sexual relationships with them will be optional, however, for story reasons, there are no different routes when it comes to pursuing them or not. This is not a dating story, your relationship with them is not a matter of merely attraction or romance, but survival. This doesn't mean the climactic chapter and endings won't reflect how you choose to see and treat each of them, and of course, you'll need to win all of them over for the harem ending. Yes, because I said survival, there will be bad ends as well, and they won't come right away too, so think carefully before you pick certain choices.

Thank you for reading as always. I will do another progress update in a few days to show off more renders. Cheers!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #18
-Progress Update-

Day 44 - 45
​

Short one today, I have a lot of things I have to do still. I finally finished the one scene I've been working on this whole week, and it is quite an eye-opener for me. This week, I completed exactly 100 renders. It is a huge increase from last week's 46. That's the good news. The bad news is, 74 of those are for one scene alone.

Why is that bad? Well, the scene itself isn't even all that wordy, I just rendered a lot of images for it because it made sense. If I do that many renders for so little text, I'm spending too much time on one scene. Last week I was considering splitting Chapter 1 into 2, now I'm considering 3 parts instead. Story-wise, it's not ideal, but I have left myself some leeway in it to make it work. As I've said many times now, I don't want to do light updates, I want to do meaty updates in a timely fashion. I also said before I want to include at least 1 major sex scene per update. That went out the window when Chapter 1 is split into 2 parts. But 3 parts? That's even longer until the naughty stuff. Some people might be fine with that, but I'm not.

So, if I'm now splitting Chapter 1 into 3 parts, I need to move scenes around a bit and add a few smaller scenes to make it flow better. I'm also adding a sex scene to part 1. This scene was originally planned for Chapter 2, but I'm doing it now. Fret not, it will make perfect sense in the story, I will never compromise my storytelling just because I need a sex scene here and there. Although, that also means I need to prepare assets for it.




Thank you for reading. Next week, I will be working on the added sex scene. Given that I need to prepare for it, and a sex scene has around 100 renders, it's going to take the whole week. But it will be fun at least. Cheers!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #19
-Progress Update-

Day 46
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Just a quick update on my progress doing prep work for the two new scenes. The scenes require 2 sets, a new full character, and a bunch of background characters. I've completed 1 set and the character, this allows me to start rendering the sex scene. It's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of pace and smoothness so far, but I have 18 done as of today.

I'm still playing around with the tone of the scene. It's a little bit heavy-handed right now, so I'll probably tweak it again once I have a bigger picture.



For this one, I wanted to experiment with the hair, see how far I can push it. The asset is pretty rigid, and it's not dynamic like some others. If I want to run fingers through the hair, it clips like crazy. Instead of saying "fuck it", I decided to paint on some hair just to try covering up the clipping. It's not perfect, but it was quick work and it's better than the unaltered.



One of the fun things for me when I produce these scenes is finding angles to hide MC's face, well at least his eyes. I think by hiding the eyes, it makes it easier for the players to insert themselves. A big problem when it comes to doing only PoV shots in a sex scene is the lack of variety and field of vision. So by going beyond PoV while limiting the exposure of the MC's facial expressions, I can maintain the intimacy of the subject matter, without detaching the players from the experience.



Speaking of subject matter, this scene sets up the rest of the story in terms of themes, even though it didn't even make the cut during the writing process. Now that it is in, I want to go all-in on it. One of the core themes of Colours is personal attachments and this scene is inspired by a manga that had an interesting take on said theme. I'm not going to name it to avoid spoilers, but its use of virginity to explore personal attachments is fascinating. And I think the topic of virginity is heavily underutilized in VNs. Either the idea of 18+ characters being virgins is too unrealistic, or they are virgins because of fetish reasons. There's so much that can be done with it in my opinion.

Thank you for reading, cheers!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #20
-Progress Update-

Day 47 - 49
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I wasn't able to find as much time to work on the game this week as usual. The plan was to finish the sex scene, I only have 60 renders at the moment. Still, I'm happy with my work rate, considering the renders took almost twice as long to render.

The reason they took that long is that I'm rendering them twice. One with the bed for the shadows, one without for post-process. I'm doing this because I'm trying something new. Maybe someone has tried it before, but I haven't seen it in other VNs before.



I don't know if people can tell what it is, but that's fine. I think it's worth the time and effort in the long run. There is a big downside to all this, it takes even longer to redo renders. This one for example is one I'm very tempted to redo, but given the time it will take, I don't know if I want to. This was part of a series of renders I did after a long day of work, and by the time I notice the error, it was too late, I already made a bunch of these.

Nah, fuck it, I'll redo them.

Thank you for reading. This was a short one, I'm restraining myself from showing too much, better save it for people to experience the whole package. Cheers!

 

[osanaiko]

I don't know if people can tell what it is, but that's fine. I think it's worth the time and effort in the long run.​

Hmmm. Is it a radial blur on the foreground and a DOF focus on the pillow in the background? looks cool!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Hmmm. Is it a radial blur on the foreground and a DOF focus on the pillow in the background? looks cool!

It's motion blur, just a little bit of it.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #21
-Writing Woes-

Day 50 - 54
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I hesitate on whether I should do an entry this week. I didn't get anything done. Well, I did finish the renders of the sex scene, and I wrote the first draft for it. Problem is, I'm not happy with it, it's not good enough. I look back at all the work I've done so far, none of it has truly met the standards I have set up. At least that's what I feel when I go through it over and over again. If my work isn't good enough for me, I'm never going to release it.

The big question for myself is why I'm not happy with it, because it shouldn't be this bad, and it really isn't bad. It took me a few days to finally figure it out. The answer is, for the first time since I started on this project, I'm unsure of myself.

Right from the start I have worked out all the development processes, organized my ideas, set what I thought was realistic expectations. I didn't start this thread to promote my game, I started it because I felt I needed something public-facing to motivate myself to commit to ideas and help organize everything. If I didn't, I know from my past experience working on creative projects, I would start from scratch every month and be trapped in a self-made endless loop. I'm the type of person to get stuck in the planning phase indefinitely until something external pull me out of it.

What does that have to do with me being unsure of myself? Well, I realize my actual abilities are not good enough for my standards. One might say I set the bar too high, but I don't believe that. I need the bar high to keep pushing myself to produce something better. The downside is there are times I realize the bar is still far out of reach, and I'm not getting any closer. I plan things out to give myself an advantage to reaching this bar, but it's not enough, I need more.

This week, I didn't do anything. I wasn't in the mood to write and design, it would be a waste of time brute forcing creative work. All these years of writing, I've never actually tried to learn it. It started off as a way to exhaust myself during sleepless nights. I would just sit down and make shit up, usually settings and scenes. I would do this sporadically for many years. At this point, I have so many things I want to tell, I need a different outlet. Typing on a Word document and letting it gather dust in My Documents isn't satisfying my need anymore. That's why I started this project, I want to do more with all the stuff I've created over the years. But if I'm going to release something to the public, it needs to be good, it can't just be insomniac drivels. My renders are barely decent enough, but my writing isn't.

So, I decided to educate myself. I spent this week doing a lot of reading and just researching how professional writers, well write. My biggest weakness is dialogue, and my prose isn't great either. That's literally all the text in VN. I think my setting, the plot, the characters and all that are fine, I just need to be better at telling it.

I've already learned a lot this week. For one, I finally understand why I'm not a fan of my own dialogue. It's mostly because I didn't write it out loud, I'm not immersed in the situation, and I tried too hard to emulate "humans". In a way, I was holding myself back as I write, like I was fucking shy as an actor on stage and won't speak up to say my lines, it just doesn't work. I end up banging my head against the keyboard, hoping that would finish the scene for me.

Anyway, I feel I could go on and on, so that's a sign for me to stop. Thank you for reading this. If you didn't, I don't blame you, I wouldn't read it. I'm feeling better now, so it's time to get back to work. Cheers!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #21
-Progress Update-

Day 55 - 58
​

After last week's sombre entry, I'm back working on the game. Turns out taking that break, educating myself, and writing that entry did more good to me than I have ever imagined.

I took the time to rework my workflow quite a bit. Previously, I would pose and render during the day. I wasn't rendering overnight. I do sometimes render overnight for more complex shots, but the rationale for not doing that was so I can iterate quickly. Detail is my bread and butter, my obsession. It's not uncommon for me to redo renders multiple times over slight misalignment of shadows, or clipping issues that can't be fixed through postprocessing. Needless to say, this bottleneck production by an even larger degree than usual.

Because I pose and render as I work, I also don't write until most of the renders are done. This is a bit of a weird process, it would make more sense to write at least a draft or even a skeleton before production, but it's how my brain works. Posing gives me inspiration, and this lets me add all kinds of little things to make each render come alive as I pose them. At least I convinced myself that's why I do things this way, I could just be full of shit and shouldn't have done things this way. Regardless, now that I'm rendering overnight, I started writing the script before production. This at least gives me a better idea of how long a scene is.

As for actual progress, I have completed 32 renders for the opening scene. This took a bit longer as the assets required nearly triple the usual time to bake than some other sets.


This shot is an example of why I thought posing and rendering during the day was worth it. The shot was missing something until I added the cyan catchlight on his eye. I wouldn't have caught that had I rendered it overnight, I would just have to redo it during the day anyway. Then there's the problem of continuity. If I added that cyan light, it has to present for the rest of the renders. So, I would have to redo all the renders the next day. Obviously, the solution to the problem is to just do a quick, low-res render first. That's how 3D animation production studio does it, so I'm going to do the same going forward.



This is the tentative opening shot of the game. That light strip on the case was added just so I can have that light reflect off the eyes from the previous image. Turns out, it was a nice practical light for lighting the scene as I continue working on the rest of them.



Another example of using the guitar case as a practical light. This one is brighter than the rest, I'm still figuring out the balance for the scene.



Haven't shown renders like this for a while, this is the marquee shot I used for lighting check, colour balance, and colour grading. It was almost good enough for the game, but alas, her fingers clipping meant I can't use it.

So, with the opening scene nearly complete, the game is now at 245 renders for 6 scenes and 4000 words. That's about halfway there. I'm debating if I want to stop at a cliffhanger or not, but that can wait. If I do decide to stop it there, that means 3 more scenes + a couple of minor scenes (4-10 renders each). If not, there are an additional 3 scenes to go.

Thank you for reading and thank you for the reactions from the last entry. Cheers!

​

 

[Bagley]

Thanks for the update Gallant Trombe, it's always appreciated, and it was interesting to learn how your creative process works. Also, your renders really are next level, whatever you are doing to make them look that good is definitely working! The main thing though is that you okay, and I'm really glad that you feel more positive, that break from the game definitely seems to have worked!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Thanks for the update Gallant Trombe, it's always appreciated, and it was interesting to learn how your creative process works. Also, your renders really are next level, whatever you are doing to make them look that good is definitely working! The main thing though is that you okay, and I'm really glad that you feel more positive, that break from the game definitely seems to have worked!

Thanks! Yea, I think it's just a cycle writers go through, I'll probably go through something like that again, but I'm a lot better now.

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #22
-Visualizing the world-

Day 59 - 63
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This week has been a week of good progress. 111 renders completed, 356 in total. A lot of these renders are for minor scenes meant to bridge major ones. They're mainly for visualizing the world and serves as an introduction to the story. One of the biggest challenges is designing a convincing sci-fi world using DAZ. Colours isn't a sci-fi story set 2-3 centuries from our time, it's set far into the future, with millennia of wide-scale cultural and technological advancement, regression, schism, and juncture. In other words, it has little to no connection to our own history and future.

The larger world itself is the most difficult part to portray. It's one thing designing a room, it's another when it comes to the streets and the people. The people problem is the one I just don't see a way to overcome. My hardware is already pushed to the limit in terms of memory and having to design diverse looking crowds just doesn't seem practical. So, I've decided to use mannequins. It's not pretty, I really don't want to do it, but it's better than empty streets, probably. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll find a better way and redo these renders.

The other problem of course is the streets themselves. There are some brilliant prefab assets out there, but there's not enough of them. So, I'm gonna need to kitbash a few. For the first release, I just need one ready.



This is the WIP. I'm trying to keep mannequins far enough to not be too obvious, and maybe I'll see about using proper figures for the near plane. The set itself is design with a 3-plane system. Near plane is of course where the characters will be, medium plane as the boundary surrounding the near plane, and finally far plane serves as the backdrop. I've never been a fan of HDRIs, I always use 3D assets whenever I can for backgrounds. There's something really off-putting to me when I see flat, real-life photos as backgrounds for clearly 3D and unrealistic characters and props. Thankfully with a sci-fi setting, I can just plop massive skyscrapers in the background and it would make perfect sense. I'm juggling between whether I should explain the blending of different eras of architecture styles, or maybe do more a Star Wars approach and just not say anything.

As for indoors, I prefer using colours and different materials to give the prefab assets a different look. Black and gold a favourite combo of mine.



This is the lobby leading to the home base of the main cast. I want the home base to be "infinitely" large, just in case I need more space in the future, this gave birth to the idea of housing an entire hotel inside a mega-building, with the upper floors ready to be retrofitted with modular prefab rooms. Besides leaving creative space for the future, it also means I don't have to worry about having to build a house that fit the story needs. A hotel is the perfect "building" that would have sufficient rooms, the hallways to connect them together, and an undefined amount of floors and rooms. The mega-building is something I haven't got around in designing the sets for yet, I'm kind of hoping I don't have to do it for the first release. It would be a pretty monumental task, and I want to wait until I'm better with DAZ before tackling it.

That's it for this entry, thank you for reading. I still have 3-6 major scenes + 1 minor scene to do before release. At my current pace, I'm looking at one more month before it is ready. However, I haven't started any work on UI assets yet, given that is uncharted territory for me, it probably will push the release further back. So, we'll see. Cheers!

 

[Gallant Trombe]

Development Journal Entry #23
-Progress Update-

Day 64 - 68

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This week has been mostly about polishing work. I reassessed all the "final" versions of my renders and redid a dozen or so of them for various reasons, generally because the quality wasn't up to standard. I also did some rewrites now that I have 80% of the scenes completed and playable.

As of right now, the game has 422 renders and roughly 7500 words. Took me about 40 minutes to go through it. I'm hoping the first release will have about an hour of content, but it might come just a bit short of that. This isn't a very wordy VN, hell at this point I feel like it's more like a graphic novel than VN. So if you're a fan of long conversations and inner monologues, this is probably not for you. Please do try it though! Anyway, I'm currently working on the most difficult to render scene of the release, so that's taking a lot of render time. After that, it's just a few conversations and teaser scenes to wrap up the day.

In terms of production, I've completed a few minor scenes to help bridge the major ones. I'm generally not a fan of "fade to black and we teleport to the destination", the pacing just feels off. So, I try to put something interesting in between these scenes if helps the story and pacing. Thankfully the narrative is not exclusively in first person, this means I can show a lot more than just what the MC sees.



This is one of those. Safiya is not a character that will formally appear until chapter 2, but she is one of the main LIs, I don't want people having to wait too long to see a bit of her. I also really enjoy writing and posing her. This might sound a bit self-congratulatory, but I really like her character.

It doesn't always work however, here is one of the renders of a scene that is likely going to get cut before release.



I wanted to do a short scene with a little bit of everything; expositions, characterization, foreshadowing, and a touch of fan service. Unfortunately, I just couldn't write a good closing line for it, which IMO is critical for scenes like this one to flow properly into the next and not feel like it is shoehorned in. I might come up with something once everything else is done and I do another rewrite, so fingers crossed I get to use these renders.

Thank you for reading, I'm looking to finish the big scene next week, and I'll be on track to finish all the renders for the release before August. Cheers!