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Hi Everyone,
Today I’d like to show you a few sneak peeks for the next chapter of “Nothing is Forever”.
Chapter 4 will be all about the cast’s adventures during spring vacation, with everyone spending lots of time together… which means there are a lot of renders to make with many characters. This is a bit tricky to handle.
Many of you might not know, but I actually just have a 4/5 years old laptop with a GTX1060 GPU to render, which is not great. That’s actually the reason for the art style for this game: my laptop would take 10-20x longer to make a single render with the typical photorealistic DAZ renders, which would make it impossible to produce a game of this nature in a reasonable time. Hence this “solution” with a more "cartoonish" style to make it much less demanding on my hardware. I actually ended up liking these graphics quite a lot and I am proud of how the game looks.
However, it’s still quite problematic to have many characters in a scene because my GPU can’t handle big scenes.
In some situations, there’s nothing else to do than to bite the bullet and just do it the hard way: make several renders and then try to composite in post. What looks like this:
Was actually made with:
Besides taking much longer, this is also tricky at times because the shadows don’t align properly betweem all the images and it requires some fine-tuning in photoshop.
(Yes, there are a few body parts clipping the floor, but that’s all hidden in the final image. The important part is that what is seen looks good. Sorry to break the magic for you
)
In other situations, I’ve tried to use “sprites” and just alternate them in the screen depending on who is talking.
This tremendously speeds up the process of having a scene ready, but it doesn’t look that good. And it can also be quite jarring the sudden change to the rest of the game that never uses this kind of style. Because of that, I’m trying to keep this to a minimum and only for less important sections of the story.
(Also, I’m really not used to do things this way. It’s hard to get the perspective and lighting between the background and characters looking good, and the idea is to not have to spend a lot of time getting it right)
Other technique that’ll be more used in this chapter is the use of comic panels. This is nothing new in the style of this game, so I think it’s less jarring and more aesthetical pleasing to the player than using sprites.
For example, the big campfire scene shown above will be mostly played out through the use of panels like these.
(The classical drinking games will be present in the chapter)
Finally, I’m also using “narrative excuses” to have few scenes with lots of characters and more scenes with just 2-3 characters, which is what my hardware can handle.
(Anyone else missing the good weather?)
The idea is to be as smart as possible in order for all of you to not even noticing that I’m working with a potato PC. And that the release of this chapter doesn’t take longer than usual.
Approximate release date
Speaking of which, given that the chapter 3 took around 3 and half months of development, I’m predicting that chapter 4 will also take around the same amount of time, or even a bit more due to these issues. So, I’m pointing out to late May as the release date. June if there are some delays.
Please plan your subscriptions accordingly. You all know that you can just unsubscribe or reduce your monthly tiers as you like. Also, once you have contributed with at least €20, you will always have access to the newer updates of the game at the same time as tier 1 patrons, even if you unsubscribe. Finally, you can just buy the new chapters at itch when it is released. I’m also considering having just a one-time payment on
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Please consider which method is best for you and how you want to support this project.
Thank you for your support
I’d also like to thank you all for your support, current and old patrons alike. Since the release of chapter 3 I’ve seen a good amount of new supporters, got many very positive reviews in several platforms, and saw the game starting to being recommended in some places. All of that makes me very happy.
I’m not sure if it’ll happen during the development of chapter 5 or 6, but I’m also positive that, sometime later this year, I’ll be able to upgrade my hardware and increase the quality of the updates. I’m looking forward to that, and I hope all of you that supported this game's development can soon see the fruits of your help.
Cheers!
