VN Ren'Py Abandoned Futagenesis Unveiled [v0.06.2] [TessaXYZ]

[WaltS]

I am quite certain they were referring to 'the other game', that is to say 'Villainess Liberty'. That one uses the Koikatsu style of graphics.

~Liz.

Ah okay , sounded like he mistook Futagenesis for Koikatsu.

OT: Tried to test-play VL but the graphics really aren't nice to look at

 

[TessaXYZ]

It was always in the back of my mind, from the very beginning, that I wanted to redo my logo and the game's title design at some point. So here they are. Far better than my hastily created ones when I released the prologue.

Those were certainly different times. As I said in December, the VN is not abandoned and Chapter 3 development continues to chug along. As to why there's such a delay... there's no short answer. Before I get into details, note that I address some of the comments I've seen here at the bottom of this post. Read that first, if you'd like.

The initial chapters were developed during COVID days. I was working from home and found myself with hours of free time, even during the work week, to dedicate to VN development. But that has changed, and I'm now in a job that demands more from me — far more than in pre-COVID days. I think I estimated each of my previous releases to require roughly 600 hours to produce, give or take a hundred. Chapter 3 will end up probably double that. I've honestly lost track of how much time I've spent on it so far, other than... it's significant.

I also took a full hiatus for about 7 or 8 months last year, for personal reasons that I don't wish to share. All of us have experienced hardships in our lives, so I hope most of you can empathize when I say my priorities had to radically shift for a while. My hardship is still ongoing, but VN development resumed late last year, albeit at a slower pace than before.

Another (more technical) contribution to slower development is the nature of Chapter 3. It takes place almost entirely within the club sequence teased throughout the game so far. It's a custom environment with thousands of objects and many, many manual adjustments to models and textures. It took me a long time to get it ready for rendering, more than I had anticipated. But that's not the main issue.

Before explaining the main issue, I should describe the usual workflow in Daz. Within the environment I've set up, I place and pose my characters and camera in the scene, and then save the scene to a new file. I don't immediately render it, rather opting to set up several scenes to sequentially render the whole batch of saved scenes while I'm at work or sleeping. I believe the most renders I've completed in a day this way was 24, but it's usually 10 or so, or occasionally less during complicated sequences. In a smaller scene with limited characters, this workflow works great.

But here, the main issue is... just how many characters are in this environment. There are ~300 girls in the club. Of those, 40 are actual unique characters (Jenny, the main crew, the girls in the Chapter 2 photos, club staff, etc) and the rest are background NPCs. To ensure the background NPCs don't look too similar, I created an array of character models, outfits, colors, and poses to mix and match from. Those background NPCs were then turned into props and instances, and then grouped by region, since loading a large number of native character models simultaneously takes forever and uses too much memory. One trade-off is that these prop characters take up more storage space than native models (over 100X).

I found that loading a saved scene that includes the environment AND the region's background NPCs AND the foreground characters takes so long (literally hours), and that saving all my scenes for Chapter 3 would be over 1 TB of data (Chapter 2 was "only" 80 GB), that the usual method of queuing renders simply would not work this time. I have to load everything in segments to get it to work (up to an hour to load it all, depending on the scene composition), and then restart the entire process every dozen renders because Daz has a memory leak issue that eventually turns it unusable or outright crashes it. Usually not a problem with sequential renders since it restarts the program for each image, but here it very much so is an obstacle.

Anyways, that's a long-winded way to say that rendering this chapter has been enormously inefficient. I don't have an exact number of images to declare completed, since they're in multiple folders, often require splicing multiple renders (24 GB VRAM still not enough in this sequence; I can't imagine trying to do this with the RTX 3070 that got me through the prologue and Chapter 1), and in multiple stages of post-processing. But it's currently about 700, I think. Chapter 2 was ~950. Chapter 3 will be substantially larger.

How much larger? Not entirely pinned down just yet. I've discussed this before my hiatus, but much of Chapter 3 is a sequence where Jenny freely roams the club in first-person. As in, you — the player — will navigate her around the club, interacting with people and objects as the night progresses. The environment will adjust as the party continues. After this sequence ends, the story collapses back down into the typical linear VN style, and I should hopefully be able to revert to the usual method of batched renders. I'm currently still writing and rendering all the interactions she has in the main sequence, of which there are many. Multiple conversations with everyone, environmental storytelling, and... spicier occurrences. Jenny's in for quite the night.

The most difficult part — namely the images that depict her first-person walk around the club, with all the variations of other characters as they too move around the space — is completed. As is the code that governs that chaos. I've also finished re-rendering some images from previous chapters, like redesigning Aimi and putting a (skimpy) top on Claire during Chapter 1's beach sequence. In hindsight, it didn't make much sense for Claire to be completely topless (among other reasons, she rode her bike through the city to get there). I also want to redo the UI and journal, but that will wait for a future version. Music is partially completed, where each track has a progression similar to how I handled the music in the dressing room scene. Some of the puzzles are done, and thankfully the code for the new puzzle type introduced this chapter has long been implemented (thanks to Deathbetray).

So, in short... things are moving. Slowly, yes, but they're moving. I know it sucks that it's taking this long, but Chapter 3 will be to the standard you've come to expect from me, and I really think you'll enjoy it when it finally releases. No one wants it to come out more than me, I assure you. This chapter closes what I consider the "first act" of Futagenesis Unveiled, and I can't wait to show you what comes after.

With love,
TessaXYZ

P.S. — A few lightning-round comments:

• No, I'm not dead. Nor am I in a war-torn country, as one comment suggested.
• No, my account was not stolen and then used to post a holiday image where the thief somehow perfectly recreated Jenny and used my editing style to trick everyone into thinking I was back.
• Payments to my Patreon are still voluntarily frozen. I don't feel comfortable accepting money for this because I still don't know how long Chapter 3 will take and I can't commit to all the bonus material I promise the various tiers. I'm still using basically all my free time on the VN, though.
• I'm posting this here and not my Patreon because this is likely where my post will get the most attention. And because, again, I've frozen my Patreon activity and don't want to indicate otherwise for now. I trust that my message here will reach everyone who still cares about FgU.
• As to why I'm still disconnected from the community... I've not been on Discord because I had to remove it from my phone. I'm not working from home anymore. I'm surrounded by people, and can't have NSFW content spontaneously appearing in that environment. Why not evenings and weekends? Well... it's a complicated continuation of why I went on my hiatus. There's a lot more to this, but (as I said in December) please know that I have my reasons. I know I need to clean up the Discord, and appoint a moderator to keep it from getting spammed with nonsense. I'll get to it eventually. And hopefully I'll be able to be more engaged with the community in the future.

 

[Buletti]

View attachment 5107341 View attachment 5107342

It was always in the back of my mind, from the very beginning, that I wanted to redo my logo and the game's title design at some point. So here they are. Far better than my hastily created ones when I released the prologue.

Those were certainly different times. As I said in December, the VN is not abandoned and Chapter 3 development continues to chug along. As to why there's such a delay... there's no short answer. Before I get into details, note that I address some of the comments I've seen here at the bottom of this post. Read that first, if you'd like.

The initial chapters were developed during COVID days. I was working from home and found myself with hours of free time, even during the work week, to dedicate to VN development. But that has changed, and I'm now in a job that demands more from me — far more than in pre-COVID days. I think I estimated each of my previous releases to require roughly 600 hours to produce, give or take a hundred. Chapter 3 will end up probably double that. I've honestly lost track of how much time I've spent on it so far, other than... it's significant.

I also took a full hiatus for about 7 or 8 months last year, for personal reasons that I don't wish to share. All of us have experienced hardships in our lives, so I hope most of you can empathize when I say my priorities had to radically shift for a while. My hardship is still ongoing, but VN development resumed late last year, albeit at a slower pace than before.

Another (more technical) contribution to slower development is the nature of Chapter 3. It takes place almost entirely within the club sequence teased throughout the game so far. It's a custom environment with thousands of objects and many, many manual adjustments to models and textures. It took me a long time to get it ready for rendering, more than I had anticipated. But that's not the main issue.

Before explaining the main issue, I should describe the usual workflow in Daz. Within the environment I've set up, I place and pose my characters and camera in the scene, and then save the scene to a new file. I don't immediately render it, rather opting to set up several scenes to sequentially render the whole batch of saved scenes while I'm at work or sleeping. I believe the most renders I've completed in a day this way was 24, but it's usually 10 or so, or occasionally less during complicated sequences. In a smaller scene with limited characters, this workflow works great.

But here, the main issue is... just how many characters are in this environment. There are ~300 girls in the club. Of those, 40 are actual unique characters (Jenny, the main crew, the girls in the Chapter 2 photos, club staff, etc) and the rest are background NPCs. To ensure the background NPCs don't look too similar, I created an array of character models, outfits, colors, and poses to mix and match from. Those background NPCs were then turned into props and instances, and then grouped by region, since loading a large number of native character models simultaneously takes forever and uses too much memory. One trade-off is that these prop characters take up more storage space than native models (over 100X).

I found that loading a saved scene that includes the environment AND the region's background NPCs AND the foreground characters takes so long (literally hours), and that saving all my scenes for Chapter 3 would be over 1 TB of data (Chapter 2 was "only" 80 GB), that the usual method of queuing renders simply would not work this time. I have to load everything in segments to get it to work (up to an hour to load it all, depending on the scene composition), and then restart the entire process every dozen renders because Daz has a memory leak issue that eventually turns it unusable or outright crashes it. Usually not a problem with sequential renders since it restarts the program for each image, but here it very much so is an obstacle.

Anyways, that's a long-winded way to say that rendering this chapter has been enormously inefficient. I don't have an exact number of images to declare completed, since they're in multiple folders, often require splicing multiple renders (24 GB VRAM still not enough in this sequence; I can't imagine trying to do this with the RTX 3070 that got me through the prologue and Chapter 1), and in multiple stages of post-processing. But it's currently about 700, I think. Chapter 2 was ~950. Chapter 3 will be substantially larger.

How much larger? Not entirely pinned down just yet. I've discussed this before my hiatus, but much of Chapter 3 is a sequence where Jenny freely roams the club in first-person. As in, you — the player — will navigate her around the club, interacting with people and objects as the night progresses. The environment will adjust as the party continues. After this sequence ends, the story collapses back down into the typical linear VN style, and I should hopefully be able to revert to the usual method of batched renders. I'm currently still writing and rendering all the interactions she has in the main sequence, of which there are many. Multiple conversations with everyone, environmental storytelling, and... spicier occurrences. Jenny's in for quite the night.

The most difficult part — namely the images that depict her first-person walk around the club, with all the variations of other characters as they too move around the space — is completed. As is the code that governs that chaos. I've also finished re-rendering some images from previous chapters, like redesigning Aimi and putting a (skimpy) top on Claire during Chapter 1's beach sequence. In hindsight, it didn't make much sense for Claire to be completely topless (among other reasons, she rode her bike through the city to get there). I also want to redo the UI and journal, but that will wait for a future version. Music is partially completed, where each track has a progression similar to how I handled the music in the dressing room scene. Some of the puzzles are done, and thankfully the code for the new puzzle type introduced this chapter has long been implemented (thanks to Deathbetray).

So, in short... things are moving. Slowly, yes, but they're moving. I know it sucks that it's taking this long, but Chapter 3 will be to the standard you've come to expect from me, and I really think you'll enjoy it when it finally releases. No one wants it to come out more than me, I assure you. This chapter closes what I consider the "first act" of Futagenesis Unveiled, and I can't wait to show you what comes after.

With love,
TessaXYZ

P.S. — A few lightning-round comments:

• No, I'm not dead. Nor am I in a war-torn country, as one comment suggested.
• No, my account was not stolen and then used to post a holiday image where the thief somehow perfectly recreated Jenny and used my editing style to trick everyone into thinking I was back.
• Payments to my Patreon are still voluntarily frozen. I don't feel comfortable accepting money for this because I still don't know how long Chapter 3 will take and I can't commit to all the bonus material I promise the various tiers. I'm still using basically all my free time on the VN, though.
• I'm posting this here and not my Patreon because this is likely where my post will get the most attention. And because, again, I've frozen my Patreon activity and don't want to indicate otherwise for now. I trust that my message here will reach everyone who still cares about FgU.
• As to why I'm still disconnected from the community... I've not been on Discord because I had to remove it from my phone. I'm not working from home anymore. I'm surrounded by people, and can't have NSFW content spontaneously appearing in that environment. Why not evenings and weekends? Well... it's a complicated continuation of why I went on my hiatus. There's a lot more to this, but (as I said in December) please know that I have my reasons. I know I need to clean up the Discord, and appoint a moderator to keep it from getting spammed with nonsense. I'll get to it eventually. And hopefully I'll be able to be more engaged with the community in the future.

Excellent post! The only sad thing about it is if there is no update in 2 weeks people will start whining again nontheless.

Welcome back and all the best for the future development!

 

[Udayana]

View attachment 5107341 View attachment 5107342

It was always in the back of my mind, from the very beginning, that I wanted to redo my logo and the game's title design at some point. So here they are. Far better than my hastily created ones when I released the prologue.

Those were certainly different times. As I said in December, the VN is not abandoned and Chapter 3 development continues to chug along. As to why there's such a delay... there's no short answer. Before I get into details, note that I address some of the comments I've seen here at the bottom of this post. Read that first, if you'd like.

The initial chapters were developed during COVID days. I was working from home and found myself with hours of free time, even during the work week, to dedicate to VN development. But that has changed, and I'm now in a job that demands more from me — far more than in pre-COVID days. I think I estimated each of my previous releases to require roughly 600 hours to produce, give or take a hundred. Chapter 3 will end up probably double that. I've honestly lost track of how much time I've spent on it so far, other than... it's significant.

I also took a full hiatus for about 7 or 8 months last year, for personal reasons that I don't wish to share. All of us have experienced hardships in our lives, so I hope most of you can empathize when I say my priorities had to radically shift for a while. My hardship is still ongoing, but VN development resumed late last year, albeit at a slower pace than before.

Another (more technical) contribution to slower development is the nature of Chapter 3. It takes place almost entirely within the club sequence teased throughout the game so far. It's a custom environment with thousands of objects and many, many manual adjustments to models and textures. It took me a long time to get it ready for rendering, more than I had anticipated. But that's not the main issue.

Before explaining the main issue, I should describe the usual workflow in Daz. Within the environment I've set up, I place and pose my characters and camera in the scene, and then save the scene to a new file. I don't immediately render it, rather opting to set up several scenes to sequentially render the whole batch of saved scenes while I'm at work or sleeping. I believe the most renders I've completed in a day this way was 24, but it's usually 10 or so, or occasionally less during complicated sequences. In a smaller scene with limited characters, this workflow works great.

But here, the main issue is... just how many characters are in this environment. There are ~300 girls in the club. Of those, 40 are actual unique characters (Jenny, the main crew, the girls in the Chapter 2 photos, club staff, etc) and the rest are background NPCs. To ensure the background NPCs don't look too similar, I created an array of character models, outfits, colors, and poses to mix and match from. Those background NPCs were then turned into props and instances, and then grouped by region, since loading a large number of native character models simultaneously takes forever and uses too much memory. One trade-off is that these prop characters take up more storage space than native models (over 100X).

I found that loading a saved scene that includes the environment AND the region's background NPCs AND the foreground characters takes so long (literally hours), and that saving all my scenes for Chapter 3 would be over 1 TB of data (Chapter 2 was "only" 80 GB), that the usual method of queuing renders simply would not work this time. I have to load everything in segments to get it to work (up to an hour to load it all, depending on the scene composition), and then restart the entire process every dozen renders because Daz has a memory leak issue that eventually turns it unusable or outright crashes it. Usually not a problem with sequential renders since it restarts the program for each image, but here it very much so is an obstacle.

Anyways, that's a long-winded way to say that rendering this chapter has been enormously inefficient. I don't have an exact number of images to declare completed, since they're in multiple folders, often require splicing multiple renders (24 GB VRAM still not enough in this sequence; I can't imagine trying to do this with the RTX 3070 that got me through the prologue and Chapter 1), and in multiple stages of post-processing. But it's currently about 700, I think. Chapter 2 was ~950. Chapter 3 will be substantially larger.

How much larger? Not entirely pinned down just yet. I've discussed this before my hiatus, but much of Chapter 3 is a sequence where Jenny freely roams the club in first-person. As in, you — the player — will navigate her around the club, interacting with people and objects as the night progresses. The environment will adjust as the party continues. After this sequence ends, the story collapses back down into the typical linear VN style, and I should hopefully be able to revert to the usual method of batched renders. I'm currently still writing and rendering all the interactions she has in the main sequence, of which there are many. Multiple conversations with everyone, environmental storytelling, and... spicier occurrences. Jenny's in for quite the night.

The most difficult part — namely the images that depict her first-person walk around the club, with all the variations of other characters as they too move around the space — is completed. As is the code that governs that chaos. I've also finished re-rendering some images from previous chapters, like redesigning Aimi and putting a (skimpy) top on Claire during Chapter 1's beach sequence. In hindsight, it didn't make much sense for Claire to be completely topless (among other reasons, she rode her bike through the city to get there). I also want to redo the UI and journal, but that will wait for a future version. Music is partially completed, where each track has a progression similar to how I handled the music in the dressing room scene. Some of the puzzles are done, and thankfully the code for the new puzzle type introduced this chapter has long been implemented (thanks to Deathbetray).

So, in short... things are moving. Slowly, yes, but they're moving. I know it sucks that it's taking this long, but Chapter 3 will be to the standard you've come to expect from me, and I really think you'll enjoy it when it finally releases. No one wants it to come out more than me, I assure you. This chapter closes what I consider the "first act" of Futagenesis Unveiled, and I can't wait to show you what comes after.

With love,
TessaXYZ

P.S. — A few lightning-round comments:

• No, I'm not dead. Nor am I in a war-torn country, as one comment suggested.
• No, my account was not stolen and then used to post a holiday image where the thief somehow perfectly recreated Jenny and used my editing style to trick everyone into thinking I was back.
• Payments to my Patreon are still voluntarily frozen. I don't feel comfortable accepting money for this because I still don't know how long Chapter 3 will take and I can't commit to all the bonus material I promise the various tiers. I'm still using basically all my free time on the VN, though.
• I'm posting this here and not my Patreon because this is likely where my post will get the most attention. And because, again, I've frozen my Patreon activity and don't want to indicate otherwise for now. I trust that my message here will reach everyone who still cares about FgU.
• As to why I'm still disconnected from the community... I've not been on Discord because I had to remove it from my phone. I'm not working from home anymore. I'm surrounded by people, and can't have NSFW content spontaneously appearing in that environment. Why not evenings and weekends? Well... it's a complicated continuation of why I went on my hiatus. There's a lot more to this, but (as I said in December) please know that I have my reasons. I know I need to clean up the Discord, and appoint a moderator to keep it from getting spammed with nonsense. I'll get to it eventually. And hopefully I'll be able to be more engaged with the community in the future.

What a relief that such a beautiful game is not abandoned! Thanks for the good news and all the best to you, Tessa

 

[adam1331]

View attachment 5107341 View attachment 5107342

It was always in the back of my mind, from the very beginning, that I wanted to redo my logo and the game's title design at some point. So here they are. Far better than my hastily created ones when I released the prologue.

Those were certainly different times. As I said in December, the VN is not abandoned and Chapter 3 development continues to chug along. As to why there's such a delay... there's no short answer. Before I get into details, note that I address some of the comments I've seen here at the bottom of this post. Read that first, if you'd like.

The initial chapters were developed during COVID days. I was working from home and found myself with hours of free time, even during the work week, to dedicate to VN development. But that has changed, and I'm now in a job that demands more from me — far more than in pre-COVID days. I think I estimated each of my previous releases to require roughly 600 hours to produce, give or take a hundred. Chapter 3 will end up probably double that. I've honestly lost track of how much time I've spent on it so far, other than... it's significant.

I also took a full hiatus for about 7 or 8 months last year, for personal reasons that I don't wish to share. All of us have experienced hardships in our lives, so I hope most of you can empathize when I say my priorities had to radically shift for a while. My hardship is still ongoing, but VN development resumed late last year, albeit at a slower pace than before.

Another (more technical) contribution to slower development is the nature of Chapter 3. It takes place almost entirely within the club sequence teased throughout the game so far. It's a custom environment with thousands of objects and many, many manual adjustments to models and textures. It took me a long time to get it ready for rendering, more than I had anticipated. But that's not the main issue.

Before explaining the main issue, I should describe the usual workflow in Daz. Within the environment I've set up, I place and pose my characters and camera in the scene, and then save the scene to a new file. I don't immediately render it, rather opting to set up several scenes to sequentially render the whole batch of saved scenes while I'm at work or sleeping. I believe the most renders I've completed in a day this way was 24, but it's usually 10 or so, or occasionally less during complicated sequences. In a smaller scene with limited characters, this workflow works great.

But here, the main issue is... just how many characters are in this environment. There are ~300 girls in the club. Of those, 40 are actual unique characters (Jenny, the main crew, the girls in the Chapter 2 photos, club staff, etc) and the rest are background NPCs. To ensure the background NPCs don't look too similar, I created an array of character models, outfits, colors, and poses to mix and match from. Those background NPCs were then turned into props and instances, and then grouped by region, since loading a large number of native character models simultaneously takes forever and uses too much memory. One trade-off is that these prop characters take up more storage space than native models (over 100X).

I found that loading a saved scene that includes the environment AND the region's background NPCs AND the foreground characters takes so long (literally hours), and that saving all my scenes for Chapter 3 would be over 1 TB of data (Chapter 2 was "only" 80 GB), that the usual method of queuing renders simply would not work this time. I have to load everything in segments to get it to work (up to an hour to load it all, depending on the scene composition), and then restart the entire process every dozen renders because Daz has a memory leak issue that eventually turns it unusable or outright crashes it. Usually not a problem with sequential renders since it restarts the program for each image, but here it very much so is an obstacle.

Anyways, that's a long-winded way to say that rendering this chapter has been enormously inefficient. I don't have an exact number of images to declare completed, since they're in multiple folders, often require splicing multiple renders (24 GB VRAM still not enough in this sequence; I can't imagine trying to do this with the RTX 3070 that got me through the prologue and Chapter 1), and in multiple stages of post-processing. But it's currently about 700, I think. Chapter 2 was ~950. Chapter 3 will be substantially larger.

How much larger? Not entirely pinned down just yet. I've discussed this before my hiatus, but much of Chapter 3 is a sequence where Jenny freely roams the club in first-person. As in, you — the player — will navigate her around the club, interacting with people and objects as the night progresses. The environment will adjust as the party continues. After this sequence ends, the story collapses back down into the typical linear VN style, and I should hopefully be able to revert to the usual method of batched renders. I'm currently still writing and rendering all the interactions she has in the main sequence, of which there are many. Multiple conversations with everyone, environmental storytelling, and... spicier occurrences. Jenny's in for quite the night.

The most difficult part — namely the images that depict her first-person walk around the club, with all the variations of other characters as they too move around the space — is completed. As is the code that governs that chaos. I've also finished re-rendering some images from previous chapters, like redesigning Aimi and putting a (skimpy) top on Claire during Chapter 1's beach sequence. In hindsight, it didn't make much sense for Claire to be completely topless (among other reasons, she rode her bike through the city to get there). I also want to redo the UI and journal, but that will wait for a future version. Music is partially completed, where each track has a progression similar to how I handled the music in the dressing room scene. Some of the puzzles are done, and thankfully the code for the new puzzle type introduced this chapter has long been implemented (thanks to Deathbetray).

So, in short... things are moving. Slowly, yes, but they're moving. I know it sucks that it's taking this long, but Chapter 3 will be to the standard you've come to expect from me, and I really think you'll enjoy it when it finally releases. No one wants it to come out more than me, I assure you. This chapter closes what I consider the "first act" of Futagenesis Unveiled, and I can't wait to show you what comes after.

With love,
TessaXYZ

P.S. — A few lightning-round comments:

• No, I'm not dead. Nor am I in a war-torn country, as one comment suggested.
• No, my account was not stolen and then used to post a holiday image where the thief somehow perfectly recreated Jenny and used my editing style to trick everyone into thinking I was back.
• Payments to my Patreon are still voluntarily frozen. I don't feel comfortable accepting money for this because I still don't know how long Chapter 3 will take and I can't commit to all the bonus material I promise the various tiers. I'm still using basically all my free time on the VN, though.
• I'm posting this here and not my Patreon because this is likely where my post will get the most attention. And because, again, I've frozen my Patreon activity and don't want to indicate otherwise for now. I trust that my message here will reach everyone who still cares about FgU.
• As to why I'm still disconnected from the community... I've not been on Discord because I had to remove it from my phone. I'm not working from home anymore. I'm surrounded by people, and can't have NSFW content spontaneously appearing in that environment. Why not evenings and weekends? Well... it's a complicated continuation of why I went on my hiatus. There's a lot more to this, but (as I said in December) please know that I have my reasons. I know I need to clean up the Discord, and appoint a moderator to keep it from getting spammed with nonsense. I'll get to it eventually. And hopefully I'll be able to be more engaged with the community in the future.

Welcome back boss

 

[blacklight47]

View attachment 5107341 View attachment 5107342

It was always in the back of my mind, from the very beginning, that I wanted to redo my logo and the game's title design at some point. So here they are. Far better than my hastily created ones when I released the prologue.

Those were certainly different times. As I said in December, the VN is not abandoned and Chapter 3 development continues to chug along. As to why there's such a delay... there's no short answer. Before I get into details, note that I address some of the comments I've seen here at the bottom of this post. Read that first, if you'd like.

The initial chapters were developed during COVID days. I was working from home and found myself with hours of free time, even during the work week, to dedicate to VN development. But that has changed, and I'm now in a job that demands more from me — far more than in pre-COVID days. I think I estimated each of my previous releases to require roughly 600 hours to produce, give or take a hundred. Chapter 3 will end up probably double that. I've honestly lost track of how much time I've spent on it so far, other than... it's significant.

I also took a full hiatus for about 7 or 8 months last year, for personal reasons that I don't wish to share. All of us have experienced hardships in our lives, so I hope most of you can empathize when I say my priorities had to radically shift for a while. My hardship is still ongoing, but VN development resumed late last year, albeit at a slower pace than before.

Another (more technical) contribution to slower development is the nature of Chapter 3. It takes place almost entirely within the club sequence teased throughout the game so far. It's a custom environment with thousands of objects and many, many manual adjustments to models and textures. It took me a long time to get it ready for rendering, more than I had anticipated. But that's not the main issue.

Before explaining the main issue, I should describe the usual workflow in Daz. Within the environment I've set up, I place and pose my characters and camera in the scene, and then save the scene to a new file. I don't immediately render it, rather opting to set up several scenes to sequentially render the whole batch of saved scenes while I'm at work or sleeping. I believe the most renders I've completed in a day this way was 24, but it's usually 10 or so, or occasionally less during complicated sequences. In a smaller scene with limited characters, this workflow works great.

But here, the main issue is... just how many characters are in this environment. There are ~300 girls in the club. Of those, 40 are actual unique characters (Jenny, the main crew, the girls in the Chapter 2 photos, club staff, etc) and the rest are background NPCs. To ensure the background NPCs don't look too similar, I created an array of character models, outfits, colors, and poses to mix and match from. Those background NPCs were then turned into props and instances, and then grouped by region, since loading a large number of native character models simultaneously takes forever and uses too much memory. One trade-off is that these prop characters take up more storage space than native models (over 100X).

I found that loading a saved scene that includes the environment AND the region's background NPCs AND the foreground characters takes so long (literally hours), and that saving all my scenes for Chapter 3 would be over 1 TB of data (Chapter 2 was "only" 80 GB), that the usual method of queuing renders simply would not work this time. I have to load everything in segments to get it to work (up to an hour to load it all, depending on the scene composition), and then restart the entire process every dozen renders because Daz has a memory leak issue that eventually turns it unusable or outright crashes it. Usually not a problem with sequential renders since it restarts the program for each image, but here it very much so is an obstacle.

Anyways, that's a long-winded way to say that rendering this chapter has been enormously inefficient. I don't have an exact number of images to declare completed, since they're in multiple folders, often require splicing multiple renders (24 GB VRAM still not enough in this sequence; I can't imagine trying to do this with the RTX 3070 that got me through the prologue and Chapter 1), and in multiple stages of post-processing. But it's currently about 700, I think. Chapter 2 was ~950. Chapter 3 will be substantially larger.

How much larger? Not entirely pinned down just yet. I've discussed this before my hiatus, but much of Chapter 3 is a sequence where Jenny freely roams the club in first-person. As in, you — the player — will navigate her around the club, interacting with people and objects as the night progresses. The environment will adjust as the party continues. After this sequence ends, the story collapses back down into the typical linear VN style, and I should hopefully be able to revert to the usual method of batched renders. I'm currently still writing and rendering all the interactions she has in the main sequence, of which there are many. Multiple conversations with everyone, environmental storytelling, and... spicier occurrences. Jenny's in for quite the night.

The most difficult part — namely the images that depict her first-person walk around the club, with all the variations of other characters as they too move around the space — is completed. As is the code that governs that chaos. I've also finished re-rendering some images from previous chapters, like redesigning Aimi and putting a (skimpy) top on Claire during Chapter 1's beach sequence. In hindsight, it didn't make much sense for Claire to be completely topless (among other reasons, she rode her bike through the city to get there). I also want to redo the UI and journal, but that will wait for a future version. Music is partially completed, where each track has a progression similar to how I handled the music in the dressing room scene. Some of the puzzles are done, and thankfully the code for the new puzzle type introduced this chapter has long been implemented (thanks to Deathbetray).

So, in short... things are moving. Slowly, yes, but they're moving. I know it sucks that it's taking this long, but Chapter 3 will be to the standard you've come to expect from me, and I really think you'll enjoy it when it finally releases. No one wants it to come out more than me, I assure you. This chapter closes what I consider the "first act" of Futagenesis Unveiled, and I can't wait to show you what comes after.

With love,
TessaXYZ

P.S. — A few lightning-round comments:

• No, I'm not dead. Nor am I in a war-torn country, as one comment suggested.
• No, my account was not stolen and then used to post a holiday image where the thief somehow perfectly recreated Jenny and used my editing style to trick everyone into thinking I was back.
• Payments to my Patreon are still voluntarily frozen. I don't feel comfortable accepting money for this because I still don't know how long Chapter 3 will take and I can't commit to all the bonus material I promise the various tiers. I'm still using basically all my free time on the VN, though.
• I'm posting this here and not my Patreon because this is likely where my post will get the most attention. And because, again, I've frozen my Patreon activity and don't want to indicate otherwise for now. I trust that my message here will reach everyone who still cares about FgU.
• As to why I'm still disconnected from the community... I've not been on Discord because I had to remove it from my phone. I'm not working from home anymore. I'm surrounded by people, and can't have NSFW content spontaneously appearing in that environment. Why not evenings and weekends? Well... it's a complicated continuation of why I went on my hiatus. There's a lot more to this, but (as I said in December) please know that I have my reasons. I know I need to clean up the Discord, and appoint a moderator to keep it from getting spammed with nonsense. I'll get to it eventually. And hopefully I'll be able to be more engaged with the community in the future.

Welcome Back

 

[Rel Teeg]

No matter what, all the best. Even only 2 chapters delivered what many many many games don't deliver even after being complete.

 

[karl768]

I'm just glad this project isn't dead, it was a crime to leave it unfinished, the game is just that good. I've no issues waiting, take your time Tessa and take care.

 

[StormPaws]

Excellent post! The only sad thing about it is if there is no update in 2 weeks people will start whining again nontheless.

Welcome back and all the best for the future development!

no for me it was more worry for Tessa with her being silent for over a year. Than the one post and no replies was also concerning
Im happy now.
And Tessa might as well put in the Harem tag lol

 

[throwaway6514]

Hell yeah!
Take your time, do it right, we're looking forward to it

 

[Jafo]

View attachment 5107341 View attachment 5107342

It was always in the back of my mind, from the very beginning, that I wanted to redo my logo and the game's title design at some point. So here they are. Far better than my hastily created ones when I released the prologue.

Those were certainly different times. As I said in December, the VN is not abandoned and Chapter 3 development continues to chug along. As to why there's such a delay... there's no short answer. Before I get into details, note that I address some of the comments I've seen here at the bottom of this post. Read that first, if you'd like.

The initial chapters were developed during COVID days. I was working from home and found myself with hours of free time, even during the work week, to dedicate to VN development. But that has changed, and I'm now in a job that demands more from me — far more than in pre-COVID days. I think I estimated each of my previous releases to require roughly 600 hours to produce, give or take a hundred. Chapter 3 will end up probably double that. I've honestly lost track of how much time I've spent on it so far, other than... it's significant.

I also took a full hiatus for about 7 or 8 months last year, for personal reasons that I don't wish to share. All of us have experienced hardships in our lives, so I hope most of you can empathize when I say my priorities had to radically shift for a while. My hardship is still ongoing, but VN development resumed late last year, albeit at a slower pace than before.

Another (more technical) contribution to slower development is the nature of Chapter 3. It takes place almost entirely within the club sequence teased throughout the game so far. It's a custom environment with thousands of objects and many, many manual adjustments to models and textures. It took me a long time to get it ready for rendering, more than I had anticipated. But that's not the main issue.

Before explaining the main issue, I should describe the usual workflow in Daz. Within the environment I've set up, I place and pose my characters and camera in the scene, and then save the scene to a new file. I don't immediately render it, rather opting to set up several scenes to sequentially render the whole batch of saved scenes while I'm at work or sleeping. I believe the most renders I've completed in a day this way was 24, but it's usually 10 or so, or occasionally less during complicated sequences. In a smaller scene with limited characters, this workflow works great.

But here, the main issue is... just how many characters are in this environment. There are ~300 girls in the club. Of those, 40 are actual unique characters (Jenny, the main crew, the girls in the Chapter 2 photos, club staff, etc) and the rest are background NPCs. To ensure the background NPCs don't look too similar, I created an array of character models, outfits, colors, and poses to mix and match from. Those background NPCs were then turned into props and instances, and then grouped by region, since loading a large number of native character models simultaneously takes forever and uses too much memory. One trade-off is that these prop characters take up more storage space than native models (over 100X).

I found that loading a saved scene that includes the environment AND the region's background NPCs AND the foreground characters takes so long (literally hours), and that saving all my scenes for Chapter 3 would be over 1 TB of data (Chapter 2 was "only" 80 GB), that the usual method of queuing renders simply would not work this time. I have to load everything in segments to get it to work (up to an hour to load it all, depending on the scene composition), and then restart the entire process every dozen renders because Daz has a memory leak issue that eventually turns it unusable or outright crashes it. Usually not a problem with sequential renders since it restarts the program for each image, but here it very much so is an obstacle.

Anyways, that's a long-winded way to say that rendering this chapter has been enormously inefficient. I don't have an exact number of images to declare completed, since they're in multiple folders, often require splicing multiple renders (24 GB VRAM still not enough in this sequence; I can't imagine trying to do this with the RTX 3070 that got me through the prologue and Chapter 1), and in multiple stages of post-processing. But it's currently about 700, I think. Chapter 2 was ~950. Chapter 3 will be substantially larger.

How much larger? Not entirely pinned down just yet. I've discussed this before my hiatus, but much of Chapter 3 is a sequence where Jenny freely roams the club in first-person. As in, you — the player — will navigate her around the club, interacting with people and objects as the night progresses. The environment will adjust as the party continues. After this sequence ends, the story collapses back down into the typical linear VN style, and I should hopefully be able to revert to the usual method of batched renders. I'm currently still writing and rendering all the interactions she has in the main sequence, of which there are many. Multiple conversations with everyone, environmental storytelling, and... spicier occurrences. Jenny's in for quite the night.

The most difficult part — namely the images that depict her first-person walk around the club, with all the variations of other characters as they too move around the space — is completed. As is the code that governs that chaos. I've also finished re-rendering some images from previous chapters, like redesigning Aimi and putting a (skimpy) top on Claire during Chapter 1's beach sequence. In hindsight, it didn't make much sense for Claire to be completely topless (among other reasons, she rode her bike through the city to get there). I also want to redo the UI and journal, but that will wait for a future version. Music is partially completed, where each track has a progression similar to how I handled the music in the dressing room scene. Some of the puzzles are done, and thankfully the code for the new puzzle type introduced this chapter has long been implemented (thanks to Deathbetray).

So, in short... things are moving. Slowly, yes, but they're moving. I know it sucks that it's taking this long, but Chapter 3 will be to the standard you've come to expect from me, and I really think you'll enjoy it when it finally releases. No one wants it to come out more than me, I assure you. This chapter closes what I consider the "first act" of Futagenesis Unveiled, and I can't wait to show you what comes after.

With love,
TessaXYZ

P.S. — A few lightning-round comments:

• No, I'm not dead. Nor am I in a war-torn country, as one comment suggested.
• No, my account was not stolen and then used to post a holiday image where the thief somehow perfectly recreated Jenny and used my editing style to trick everyone into thinking I was back.
• Payments to my Patreon are still voluntarily frozen. I don't feel comfortable accepting money for this because I still don't know how long Chapter 3 will take and I can't commit to all the bonus material I promise the various tiers. I'm still using basically all my free time on the VN, though.
• I'm posting this here and not my Patreon because this is likely where my post will get the most attention. And because, again, I've frozen my Patreon activity and don't want to indicate otherwise for now. I trust that my message here will reach everyone who still cares about FgU.
• As to why I'm still disconnected from the community... I've not been on Discord because I had to remove it from my phone. I'm not working from home anymore. I'm surrounded by people, and can't have NSFW content spontaneously appearing in that environment. Why not evenings and weekends? Well... it's a complicated continuation of why I went on my hiatus. There's a lot more to this, but (as I said in December) please know that I have my reasons. I know I need to clean up the Discord, and appoint a moderator to keep it from getting spammed with nonsense. I'll get to it eventually. And hopefully I'll be able to be more engaged with the community in the future.

Dear Tessa,

It was hard to believe that you are back reading your post. I also was along the members thinking this game was going to an end it is not deserving. It was/is so promising. So I was sad reading all the posts that it was stopped.

I am very happy that you are back on the track developing this game to Ch3. No matter what time it will take there is now light at the end of the tunnel not being a train. And that is making me happy.

All the best to you, take care and we are waiting on the next chapter!

 

[BigTTiger]

Welcome back Tessa

 

[Frost_96]

Love that the negative nancies got proven wrong in this instance, i bet some wont even admit they were wrong and just double down and still claim the game is dead

 

[Solomon Grundy]

Love that the negative nancies got proven wrong in this instance, i bet some wont even admit they were wrong and just double down and still claim the game is dead

I don't believe this post is real any more than I did last time. I think it's a troll who's enjoying stringing people along.

I will admit I was wrong when Tessa posts on her own frigging Discord or Patreon and not before. Yes, I too read the excuses why that hasn't happened, but I don't believe them.

"I can't post on Discord, because I'm surrounded by people, but I can post on this site that has porn banners because reasons. I'm not putting up a simple message on Patreon that says payments will not be resumed, but I am alive and well. Also because reasons."

Sorry, that just doesn't track.

 

[StormPaws]

I don't believe this post is real any more than I did last time. I think it's a troll who's enjoying stringing people along.

I will admit I was wrong when Tessa posts on her own frigging Discord or Patreon and not before. Yes, I too read the excuses why that hasn't happened, but I don't believe them.

"I can't post on Discord, because I'm surrounded by people, but I can post on this site that has porn banners because reasons. I'm not putting up a simple message on Patreon that says payments will not be resumed, but I am alive and well. Also because reasons."

Sorry, that just doesn't track.

Good point....Cause its not that hard being active on discord. Or at last reply maybe once a week or day and thats it
No it was complete radio silence and i never seen this before on any discord

 

[Blurpee69]

I don't believe this post is real any more than I did last time. I think it's a troll who's enjoying stringing people along.

I will admit I was wrong when Tessa posts on her own frigging Discord or Patreon and not before. Yes, I too read the excuses why that hasn't happened, but I don't believe them.

"I can't post on Discord, because I'm surrounded by people, but I can post on this site that has porn banners because reasons. I'm not putting up a simple message on Patreon that says payments will not be resumed, but I am alive and well. Also because reasons."

Sorry, that just doesn't track.

I agree with you for the most part. There is simply too much that isn't adding up and it's all very suspicious. The only thing that gives me a moments pause is I don't think we've seen either render that was in the newest post before. Not that either of those are particularly detailed renders, but I doubt a troll would go through the additional effort to make two new renders for a post to lead like 100 people on for hope in a game.

 

[Buletti]

Oh yeah, a troll somehow hijacking the devs account and then writing a long ass article about why he was absent and now back to "stringing people" (for which reason?) is obviously highly suspicious!

Very much more suspicious than the actual dev just posting to report back...

 

[Jafo]

I don't believe this post is real any more than I did last time. I think it's a troll who's enjoying stringing people along.

I will admit I was wrong when Tessa posts on her own frigging Discord or Patreon and not before. Yes, I too read the excuses why that hasn't happened, but I don't believe them.

"I can't post on Discord, because I'm surrounded by people, but I can post on this site that has porn banners because reasons. I'm not putting up a simple message on Patreon that says payments will not be resumed, but I am alive and well. Also because reasons."

Sorry, that just doesn't track.

Well you can be rite. But for heavens sake hop you are not!

 

[horns of giant]

Always doubt it. If it is false, you win the argument. If it is true, you get your favourite futa game.
Although I saw someone (Deathbetray) on discord claiming to verify the message because they indeed helped in the puzzle code.

 

[RC-1138 Boss]

Nice to hear you are doing well Tessa .