You must be registered to see the links
Hey guys!
I'm happy to announce that this will be the final dev log 0.13 cycle, as development for the update is now nearing completion. Unfortunately it won't quite be as soon as I had hoped: the new method of animation I've mentioned before has been taking tons more time than I originally anticipated, though I'll give a bit more information about that later.
For now, the usual progress report: This has probably been the most productive couple of weeks I've ever had (mostly due to some ungodly working hours, but it's well worth it for the progress!) In the last 2 weeks I've completed around a dozen more animations, made around 8 new character models, 15 new complex outfits, and the most important part: 450 more renders are done.
If I only had renders left to do then I would be confident in saying the release would be next weekend, but I'm currently working on a short animated scene, and there is another huge animated scene left to do a little later that is going to slow me down a lot.
To give a little insight into that, the new animation method I'm using is called timeline animation. The way that works is that I have to manually input every movement and transformation of every bone/joint of the characters involved, and then time them all together by creating what are called keyframes.
Here's a picture of one of the animations I've done recently for the upcoming update:
Each of those red dots is a keyframe, representing a single movement or transformation for the joint marked on the left hand side, all of which I've created manually and timed together to make a smooth animation sequence. The one pictured took about 5 hours, and an animated scene can take anywhere from 3 to 12 of these. So it's a lot of work, more than I first anticipated!
In the future this won't be an issue, since I know what I'm doing now I can properly account for it, but this time it threw my release estimates completely off.
Another thing I've run into with this new animation, which I hadn't thought about previously, is that they're taking up a mountain of file space! Previously all of the animated scenes were made up of 2-3 second loops, however with this new method I'm making quite a few longer videos, some up to 30 seconds, which means in this update alone the animations are going to take up around a gigabyte of space.
This isn't the end of the world, it's just a cost of the improved quality, but I might have to start looking more at reducing that size in the future. Hopefully I can add some more video compression in a way that doesn't degrade image quality noticeably.
Anyway, all that's getting away from what I'm sure is the most interesting point for most of you, and that's the release date:
I'm aiming for October 31st. Earlier is possible, but not likely with everything else going on (other than the animation, there are still a few UI kinks to be ironed out with the changes I mentioned last time).
With the important stuff out of the way, I also wanted to briefly bring up the question of a 4k version that I mentioned in the last dev log: While there was some interest in it, the overwhelming majority seemed to either be uninterested, or leaning towards wanting me to spend the time on regular content instead, so that's the option I've decided to go with for now. What I might do is, whenever the game is finally all finished, release a 4k version then. So until then, apologies to those few of you that got your hopes up!
Now as I said at the start, this will be the final dev log for this update cycle, as I don't imagine anything particularly worth talking about will come up in the next few weeks before release. So, until then, thank you all for your support. I'm really looking forward to getting this one out for you to read!
- Cosy Creator
