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Sneak Peek 04/18/2024
5 hours ago
This scene is close to my personal favourite in the update. Top 3 at least. We'll learn some important things about our resident little Frenchie. And I think her fans will be rather pleased.
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- May 15, 2018
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The dev's attention to detail is impressive as always. In the first image Ines is playing an actual chord on the guitar (G# minor if anyone is interested). I can't recall seeing a VN with a character playing a guitar – and I've seen many musicians portrayed in a number of games over the years – where the fingering was accurate to real life. It's a minor detail, yes, but those details do add up to make or break immersion in a story, and this world definitely has a great sense of verisimilitude to it because of the effort displayed by its creator.
- Nov 14, 2017
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BaDIK also has guitar scenes, no idea how accurate they are though, not a musician myself
There are plenty of games with accurate fingering if you don't limit yourself on musicians...
- Feb 16, 2023
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If the fingering is done properly, the LI will sing.
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Check In 04/19/2024
6 hours ago
Because of changes to the actual in game renders for the respective scenes the corresponding title screens needed some changes as well, nothing special or all that different, but it gives you something to look at this week.
As I moved through the code this week a scene stuck out to me as being... not good. Now obviously I don't expect perfection but this scene was visually not up to even my lowest standard. So Tuesday and part of Wednesday I worked on getting it fixed and rendered. It was a pretty short scene, only about 70 renders so I knocked it out quickly. Now we're back to regular schedule.
Final batch of animations trucking along. Hoping it should be essentially finished by early next week.
Testing seems to be going fairly well. I'm sure they don't want to strangle me at all...
From a coding/ pathing perspective this is something of a difficult update for the testers. This update is sort of the ground floor for the rest of the game and as such there are a lot of variables from previous updates that are being consolidated into more manageable paths. As a result there's a lot a variables that need to be accounted for. One path in particular my main tester was happy to point out had 24 potential variants to it. He was thrilled with it, not at all exasperated I assure you. But that's just an example of the sort of consolidation this update needs to achieve to ensure that updates going forward are more streamlined. Not only for gameplay purposes, but for everybody's sanity, especially mine.
Otherwise days are pretty much the same, I get fixes, I make fixes. I have a whole list of renders that need to be fixed and have slowly been chipping away at them as they come in.
Nothing else from a work perspective to discuss. I will make a note though that based on the speed of everything currently, I think it's unlikely we'll make the end of April, wanted to tell you that so you have the info. May is for sure though, you have my promise on that. If for any reason it's not out in May I'll be putting all payments on hold until release. Just giving you that info so you can plan around it as well.
I hope you have all have a lovely weekend, and thank you as always for the support.
Sláinte!
- Feb 16, 2023
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Depends. If they lead to 24 significantly different outcomes, then probably yes. If they only lead to a handful of different paths, but have variances in the way you get there (language, someone having issues with you before returning to base course, etc.), then maybe not.
Missing a bit of dialogue is not a huge deal to me; if we can get all major events (and most minor) via a half dozen or so courses with a few secondary variants in those courses, then that doesn't seem too bad. It can account for guys that prefer being the "macho man", the "asshole", the "nice guy", and other variants in their actions. I would suspect that's what this is.
- Dec 1, 2022
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Liar! She's just giving us the finger, pretending to play.
But yeah that's a barre on the fourth, so g# indeed. neat!
- May 15, 2018
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Now I can't unsee that in the image, no matter how hard I try.
All my minor chords will have to be major from now on, to avoid flipping someone the bird. You know, after playing the guitar for decades, it's amazing I never realized what was going on so prominently with the middle finger until you just pointed it out.I disagree kinda.
Imo you cant really be a perfectionist being an avn dev, you wont get anything done at all. They have to always find/keep a balance between development speed and the love for the details.
I think its a skill if a dev learns to know which things are unecessary for like 99,9% of the reader and the wont even notice it, while the dev himself notices every little thing if he's a perfectionist, no matter if its about the visual or the text.
I would kinda argue that your example is close to unecessary as a overwhelming majority wont notice it anyway, not like it really matters or made things slower for this one example but in general. Some devs invest coutless weeks into setup of locations which are shown in like 10 renders because of their perfectionism.
- May 15, 2018
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You're not wrong about this. And I generally feel the same way too. Getting bogged down in the minutiae is how many projects fall behind, and it is the unfortunate reason that a lot of them don't even finish. Also, I'm a big fan of the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle when coming up with the best solutions to all types of problems. I've seen enough overdesigned messes in my day to want to avoid that path forever.
On the other hand though, Red Letter Media's famous quote of: "You may not have noticed it, but your brain did." does come to mind when deciding on the importance of many visual details in stories. And I do think that the developer for STWA: Unbroken does a great job of using this particular medium of visual novels to convey so much about the characters and the world around them. In the case of the Ines teaser image, the fingers and hands had to be placed somewhere on the fretboard, so why not make sure they make musical sense? Sometimes those details do make a big difference, even though they may seem small.
The best example of this kind of big impact from small details may be in the following image, which is one of my favourite in this game:
View attachment MallorcaWalkElspeth122.webp
This is a game render from Chapter 6, during the nighttime walk with Elspeth before the big fight in Mallorca. Notice in particular the interesting placement of Elspeth's hands, which tells the reader so much about her emotional state without any words needing to be spoken. One of her hands is balled into a fist, telling us that she's ready to fight, while the other hand grips her forearm, appearing to the reader like she's holding herself back, and is keeping strong emotions from showing elsewhere. The majority of the audience likely didn't even register this unassuming posture consciously. I mean, her hands are barely even in the rendered frame! But it's definitely one of those "your brain still noticed it" moments. Even without knowing why, it looks to the viewer like there's something...dangerous, or angry, beneath her calm visage that is center frame, and that draws our attention away from the revealing state of her hands. So when she says: "Seen the worst humanity has to offer, I'd wager." at this point in the scene, it lands so much harder because of the great – but simple! – visual storytelling that the dev uses to accompany that dialog.
Yeah thats absolutly true and so hard to determine how many %people notice which details.
I experience it with my girlfriend always how different perception can be. She always notices every little detail no matter what, remembers it and could explain it in detail afterwards while my brain works more like its perceiving the big picture focused on supposedly "important" little things like facial expressions but rarely on for example stuff in the background my brain considers at not important.
Hmm im not sure i explained that well
- May 15, 2018
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It is the case that women do tend – at the group level of course – to consciously notice body language more than men do (and to be clear, significant variation in this trait exists at the individual level). If prompted to describe her character, most everyone would say that Elspeth had "something bothering her", and was "hiding something important and troubling", but they wouldn't always be able to point to all the visual cues that establish this feeling in the audience. However, those small details do add up, and become very important in establishing and reinforcing the reality of who she is.
Personally, I'm more like you, and I rarely notice this kind of thing on first watch/read/listen. And that's actually a good thing, because it means I'm still able to genuinely enjoy various media directly and in an honest fashion. However, if a story really catches my interest, like in the case of STWA: Unbroken, then I will sometimes go back and try to understand what was done so effectively to make me care and believe in the world and its characters. This type of analysis becomes a way to enjoy the work more, by trying to catch stuff I missed. That understanding may help me notice a few more things as the story continues, but luckily it doesn't fundamentally change the way I engage with media, and I can still just get drawn into a world instantly when I start reading again. Even the stuff I write, or the music I compose...I can still experience it later in a direct way, without thinking of it at a meta level, which is very handy.
I also sometimes do this with things that fail to hold my interest, although usually not in as much depth. And one of the ways that these works can occasionally fail is in a series of what might best be described as: "small missed opportunities". It often isn't so much what they did that is the problem. It's what they didn't do that creates a disconnect, and why the viewer/reader's mind suddenly starts to wander while experiencing a piece of fiction, or why the listener's brain grows bored when hearing a piece of music.
In the end, perception and enjoyment of art is a very interesting and complicated subject to ponder.
- Mar 1, 2023
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Sneak Peek 04/25/2024
17 hours ago
Couldn't immediately decide what to share on what will probably be our last sneak peek of this update cycle, decided to go with three renders I've dubbed "The Many Faces of Els."
Different times, different styles, different paths. Same lovely lass. I'll be interested to see which faces you get on your playthrough.
