@cadwaladr and Carpe Stultus: So I totally realize and believe that, whether you love it or hate it, y’all are obviously entitled to your opinions about my work either way. And I definitely realize it’s not gonna be for everyone, just because, like, what game ever could be? But the game starts out with this splash image:
And I said in my very first post in this thread:
...as far as the grainyness of most of the images, this is just our first early access demo, so
a lot of the images need to be re-rendered to a much higher quality. Hopefully if our
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takes off we can get a few good video cards and speed up our render time dramatically, I'm on a gaming laptop that's a few years old, and my gaming desktop is more than a few years old at this point.
And in the changelog it clearly states:
• Added context-aware backdrops to the location and map systems: locations now dynamically select their background images based on current time of day (existing location images are merely placeholders, *NOT AT ALL* indicative of planned final quality).
So like, I super don’t want to come across as a dick or anything, but I don’t really know what else I could have done to make that any more transparent and honest. I
am kicking myself pretty hard, though, because in the very beginning of development I
had considered adding this sticker to all the images in the game that weren’t/aren’t finished yet:
You can even find it in /game/gui/wip_stamp.png if you crack open the Ren’Py archive. Ultimately I chose not to use it, because I just thought that either:
A. To keep it from being too annoying, I’d have to make the sticker so small no one would actually notice it, or,
B. if it
was big enough to notice, it would be super distracting and make the entire demo just unplayable because of the huge ugly watermark over the top of the entire screen.
(Though, I must admit I only just now realized, while typing this, that I could have the sticker there by default, but give the player the option to turn it off if they wish, so, maybe that’s what I’ll do. I’ll have to try that out and see how it looks. It might slow the intro down too much to have to explain that to the player first thing. I’ll report back on that later!)
TL;DR for the rest of this post: I’m just one guy, and I’m working literally as fast as I can. Last year I made an entire game and released it completely for free, not monetized in any way (this one right here: Head of the Class) BEFORE ever starting a Patreon or SubscribeStar or Kickstarter or whatever, so people could see what I was capable of first, all up front, without being hit up for any money, with the idea being if they liked it, they'd hopefully want to support me working on something larger. Then I lost my job due to COVID, so something that originally I intended to do as a nights-and-weekends hobby for the next few years, super low-stress, building up an audience very gradually over time, is something that I now have the opportunity to try to turn into a real career, if I bust my motha-fuckin’ ass, like, right the fuck now, as we speak. So if you give me a chance to prove it, I can promise you this will be one of the hottest, funniest, most fun to play and most polished and bug-free adult games available on the net.
cadwaladr, I’m definitely not asking you to give us a 5-star rating or anything (not until we’ve earned it!), but would you please consider removing your negative review? Members of this site might see a 2-out-of-5 star average review score on our listing and think, ‘ahh, fuck that! I’m not even clicking to see if I might be interested in it if it’s only 2-stars!’ That could really just tank any momentum we’ve started to build here. It’s a free country, and you don’t owe me shit, but I’m just asking if you’ll please consider it.
And I genuinely don’t think this should mean shit to anyone, but just, technically, for the record I have a degree in Mass Communication with an emphasis on Film & Video Production, and have produced VR content and games and digital graphics for Coca-Cola, the USDoD and Intel, among many others. Now, I realize this is the internet and we’re all anonymous so I could say literally anything, right, I could say I’m a U.S. Marine Special Forces Sniper in Afghanistan with a 14-inch cock and I have seven black belts in Karate and whup-di-fuckin’-doo, right, so I truly don’t expect *
anyone* to give a
fuck about my background. But I can assure you, I do care
very much about the integrity of our visuals (and our programmer and co-designer, one of my best friends in the world, Bruder Braunbär, has worked on the biggest AAA games at the largest game studios in the world, so I can assure you HE cares very much about the 'tegrity of our gameplay. He doesn't love that I insist on Ren'Py and won't move to Unity or Unreal, but I want the extremely deep backwards compatibility Ren'Py has with older hardware to be available to what I think is probably the largest adult-game-consuming audience in the world, all the hundreds of millions of somewhat dated laptops and tablets and Android devices. Hell, that's what I play 'em on!)
Also, something else to maybe consider: many of these adult games are made by first-time amateurs (and there’s nothing wrong with that! We all start somewhere, and sometimes amateurs have the courage to try things professionals are too cynical to try, and we end up with Pong or Tetris or King’s Quest or Doom or Super Meat Boy, etc. etc.) But I think the overwhelming majority of people not really having any idea what they’re doing when they’re making these things has given people an incorrect assumption about how actual game development, and early-access software development in general, is really supposed to work.
Our opening party scene has 18 images (err, 20 now, I just added two more last night). Since y’all both seem to know just how long rendering can really take, hopefully y’all can appreciate that it just wouldn’t make sense to render every shot in a scene to 100% quality, for 24 to 48 hours
each, before we’re
absolutely sure we’re happy with them, every one of them, as a complete set, right?
Let’s say we let the first 15 images render for 24 hours each. That means for over two weeks my desktop was unavailable for any other game development at all, right (much less Beat Saber, literally my favourite game of all time, which I never get to play any more because I’ve been rendering for the past four months non-stop! ╥﹏╥).
So after those two weeks go by, my wife comes to me and says: "Hey, I found a much better couch for this scene on the Daz store, it looks a million times better, we should 100% use this one instead." (She is a professional fashion reseller and went to college for interior design, and I wear the same white t-shirt seven days a week and had a mattress on the floor when we started dating, so I trust her opinion over my own on these issues 10 times out of 10
)
Or what if, like, we go to render that 16th image and suddenly realize: dang, you know, now that I think of it, wouldn’t it be so much funnier, or so much sexier, or just make way more sense for the plot, if this character in this shot had come into the room from the back door instead of the front door?
In order to change something that will affect the entire scene, we’d have to throw away the
two weeks worth of images we
just got done rendering! Images maybe we've never even put online yet! Images that now
no-one will ever see.
Not to mention, images that we’d made at the expense of
any other part of the game getting worked on with our desktop, right? Wouldn't that just be a nutso way to make a game? To make anything?
I hope y'all can see that even under the best circumstances that’s just not a very tenable way to get anything done. This game as planned would take 20 years to make that way! And when people do work that way, often because they just don’t know any better, it causes them to reject those better ideas when they come along because they’ve already sunk so much time or money or effort into previous parts of their project. I might be forced to tell my wife: “No, there’s no way we can change that couch now, despite the fact that even a blind man could plainly see that other one is way better, because we’ve already spent too much time on the renders we’ve previously done!” And that’s just a very difficult way to make a really good game.
So instead, we knock out these very rough, plainly draft-quality images as fast as we can, 10-20 minutes are spent rendering each one, tops, so that we can stage everything, script everything, move things around, make sure the poses make sense, and make sure the scene flows naturally. More often than not, I think a certain idea in my head is going to work perfectly, so I’ll compose, pose, stage, light, block and render the rough drafts of the images, write the script, code it all up, and realize: ‘Wow, that line of dialogue makes no fucking sense! This is all garbage! Boy, what asshole wrote this scene, anyway?’ But then I realize, well, hmm, what if I moved this line of dialogue to much earlier in the conversation... Well, but, now
that means that
earlier image will need to focus on the main character instead of the girl he’s talking to, or vice versa, or whatever, right? So I then have to re-render that, etc. etc.
Maybe you're thinking: pff, 24-48 hours, at
720p?? Give me a break. What an exaggeration. Keep in mind, though, we have an enormous amount of reflective and refractive glass and metal surfaces in that party scene, from all the beer bottle and beer can and trophy case props (as opposed to the completely spartan, vacant, prop-less and empty backgrounds of so many CG adult games). Plus, there’s almost a dozen on-screen characters in some of the shots, all with hair, and sub-surface-scattered translucent skin (as opposed to the many CG games which only have a single character on screen at any one time, many of them even calling themselves out on it with a character making an ironic 4th-wall-breaking joke like “boy isn’t it weird that whenever we go to a restaurant, we’re the only two people ever there?” or “huh, isn’t it funny how we never see any other people out on the streets when we’re out in the middle of the day?”)
And all of that stuff is being illuminated by the seven shadow-casting Daz lights and the 16K HDRI environment coming in all the windows and throwing all those beautiful soft cookie shadows and highlights around. That means that these shots, even at merely 720p, believe it or not, take 24 hours on my single RTX 2070 Super to look completely acceptable (what I’d comfortably call ‘shippable final quality’) and a full 48 hours to be completely grain free (to the naked eye, of course there will always be some you can find with an optical spectrometer or whatever).
So when you see our game, in its early, early pre-alpha state, and say “Well all the images aren’t all perfect, so that means the developer is a stupid lazy asshole”, it just feels like, dang, man, where is this negativity coming from? I thought that was specifically the whole cool thing
about Early Access™, is that anyone who is curious can truly see how the sausage is really made, along every step of the way, warts and all! It'd be like if you said, “This game would be way better if it had an ending. Because it doesn’t have an ending, you just know the developer is a real piece of shit.” Like... it just doesn’t have an ending because I haven’t made one yet, right? Those renders are bad because I haven’t rendered them good yet. I’m only one guy!
I wake up around 6am, walk and feed my dogs and then I start working on the game until I go to bed at midnight, seven days a week. And boo hoo, right? That's the job. That's what I signed up for. And I'm not complaining. I fuckin' love this shit. Making a video game is like playing the world's greatest, most complicated video game possible. And this is gonna be the best game I've ever made, and I've made a few pretty good ones, if I may say so myself. I'm 38 years old and I've been making computer games for 32 years.
But there's only so many hours in a day and time I spend on the UI is time I can’t spend in Daz (though there’s almost always a render baking on the tower no matter what I’m doing on my laptop). Time I spend on making sure the save games work without any bugs is time I can’t spend scripting new scenes. I have to make decisions like that.
Two years ago when I saw how well Summertime Saga was doing, and what a fun, sex-positive game it was, I went to my wife and said, I think if I spent two or three years, in my free time, nights and weekends, I could definitely make a game just like that (at that point some of my indie, solo-developed games had been written about in places like PC Gamer, Polygon, Rock Paper Shotgun, Macworld, etc., and one of them was nominated for an indie game of the year award at SXSW in Austin, TX).
So I purposely made an entire, complete, 100%-free game BEFORE ever asking anyone for a nickel
(again, that's this one right here: Head of the Class ). I produced it at as good a quality as I could manage on my own, to show people exactly what I considered “good enough” when it came to art, writing, bugs, and polish. It’s short and sweet, but it shows the level of writing I’m capable of, the level of graphics I can produce, and it has a bunch of awesome cum shots to show that I can deliver the goods. Obviously it’s up to you if you think it’s great or if it sucks, like I said in the beginning, you may just think my shit is trash and always will be.
So anyways, we put that game out, things were going good on working on this next one, at a leisurely pace, in my spare time, then I lost my job due to my company laying off 90% of their staff due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, and here we are today. While I look for a new job I'm just hitting development on this game as hard as I can. If I can manage to pay my bills doing this before I manage to find a new job, that'd be sick. If not, that's ok too.
Anyways, I know this was long as hell, but I just feel like, if I'm gonna beg people for money on the Internet to make a video game where girls take their titties out, the least I can do is try to address people's concerns to the best of my ability, right?
So, to wrap this all up sometime this century...
Now that myself, my wife and our buddy ol' Brown Bear are certain we're happy with the very first scene, we are re-rendering all the shots and allowing them to bake for 12 hours each. Like I said earlier, I still think that's half the time they'll really need to be ready for primetime, but I think it's a good compromise between time and quality:
So, if by some miracle you're even still reading this, just know I definitely give a huge shit about how the game looks. This is what I do for a living AND for fun in my spare time.