By the way, I don't see how to continue waiting a few months after several months is something positive, but hey... maybe it's the alcohol talking
Feedback and communication is very good, but straight up changing plans you've set your mind on for so long to cater to the loud minority is not the play. Please, reconsider if it comes to the scenario that option B is taken.
I wouldn't worry about that...I hope the patrons have learned from their mistakes and won't choose the wrong option B or everyone (they included) will regret it.
You're Crazy .....The vote of the people is very obvious... many will vote thinking "oh great, I will vote for this to last a little longer and surely in 2 weeks we will get 500 new renders, yes sir, I will vote for that option" Meanwhile those of us who know that this is not It works like this:
August? Wow, that is optimism, I would say that if we have a release date for November it will be a miracle, some will call me crazy
Northpx
You must be registered to see the links
Hello, everyone!
This week we'll focus on the content we have so far, and what still remains to be created. We have passed the point of doubling the content of CH04. In quick numbers, CH05 currently looks like this:
- 2400+ renders (rendered and unrendered).
- 8 lewd animations (unrendered).
The last stretch of work consists of several hundred renders still, mainly remaining scenes of Eve, Bree and Mia.
For a good while now we're been running a big render queue, which has been in the hundreds at times. The animation frames are also all unrendered because we're rendering out the story renders first. There's still a couple of possible animations and some extra angles we'd like to do, but they're in "maybe" territory. We're opting out of cinematic and extra animations until we're able to render 24/7 in the background.
We haven't been fond of making estimations because the render times are a huge impacting factor and there are only so many hours in the day to create new content. Our current render queue for example is "only" about 90 hours if left to render continuously, plus loading times. The animations are far, far in the 100+ hours territory... but we'll look into optimizing that when we reach that point.
At this point it might be obvious what the problem is, and the good news is that we've worked towards fixing it. We are slowly building a 24/7 rendering rig. We've already done a lot of the back-end work to have it functioning with ease when it comes to file sharing, assets and that sort of thing. Our plan has been to get this rig fully functional with the release of CH05.
Choices, choices...
We also had a really long talk about the development time of CH05 and how it took over the content of CH06. We're not really happy about it, and at this point we're not as confident that we made the right call. The longer wait times are coming back around to bite us in the ass... but there's always options to consider.
After thinking it over, we boiled it down to two possible options:
A) Continue creating CH05 as we currently are.
B) Make changes to CH05, moving some scenes to CH06 to release faster.
Option A means the train keeps on chugging, no stops. We finish the evening and night content fully before releasing CH05 exactly as we envisioned it, with no scenes left out. It would still take some time to create, and especially to render. We prefer this option because it's the whole package as we planned it.
Option B means the train switches tracks. We cut the chapter right before the night content starts with the main girls and save those scenes for the next chapter. This obviously means CH05 wouldn't contain all the content we envisioned for it and might end abruptly, but it would enable us to release the chapter much faster.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Regardless, the render queue is popping off and the work continues. On the coding and SFX side of things, work has been a breeze since it's much easier when it doesn't require hundreds of hours of waiting (unless something is seriously wrong). We also edited the script and created more custom morphs for our clothing so the fabric moves more naturally.
Next week we're looking forward to focus on some intimate scenes, and more scripting.
Other news
We published June's special render of Mia earlier today. It's a little camping trip with some strip poker. In case you didn't have a chance to see it yet,You must be registered to see the links
Cheers,
Robison & Npx
Fuck em.ding to my personal observations, some players begin to rebel after 9 months of waiting
Jericho! Haven't seen you for a long time.Fuck em.
The impatient fuckers can whine all they want. The update is ready when it's ready and I'm happy to wait. I follow a lot of these VNs and almost almost all of the best quality ones are on a 6+ update cycle. A few even longer. This degree of polish in digital art takes time and there's plenty of other shit to do in the meantime.
Besides... according to my personal observations, the people who to tend to get angry and start posting "milker" theories after long update cycles tend to also be the people who never donate a cent to any of these devs on Patreon.
No, you're not a troll.I hope I'm not that "troll" just because some of you don't like to hear the truth
PTSD from the lastest Radiant "beta" update that is going to take the full 14 months to get a full release. There's no way around bad dev pratices and I rather them doing what they've planned and stick with it, improving on the next dev cycle rather than fix mistakes and say its the patrons fault. That said, they do need to plan how to improve speed because I'm not sure a 8 month window per update for 1hour tops is acceptable, especially in this phase.Northpx
My personal opinion is going with Option A. Do your game as planned, follow your vision. I've seen a lot of unfinished updates that have been stripped down for the sake of speed, they always seem incomplete and ragged. Usually after this I look at the screen and think: "What the hell was that?"
But you guys definitely need another power rig, it looks like you may end up in a situation where you have completed the development, prepared / posed all the renders and animations, written the code, but ... you still have a large queue of animations and have to wait until they complete.
The main thing here is to strike a balance between schedule updates and the amount of content. Resist the temptation to make the game even bigger, because then the development speed will be delayed and you will not get improvements, and some players will lose interest. According to my personal observations, some players begin to rebel after 9 months of waiting.
It's always a little different from one dev to another. Different hardware, different experience levels, knowledge, skillsets, aptitudes, etc... And I can be pretty fucking critical when it comes to VNs that I think have shit writing (you know I've had words about SG ). But one thing I'll never do is criticize how long it takes for the Dev to release his or her work. I want to see good art and good writing, and both can take a while to get it right. Sometimes delays for revisions are necessary. So it's important to me that the Dev takes all the time they need and not rush things just because of pressure from some impatient vocal minority.UPD:
The one problem in things you said:
Summer Heat is not yet a top VN with a captivating story, this game attracts mostly with beautiful girls. The dev started to increase the development cycle and make big updates too early. It's more important to get a large audience interested first, and only then expand the game, otherwise people can really lose interest, because the game, although good, is not a blockbuster like Artemis, BaDIK, Summers Gone, ORS and other top games.
I think that if a dev says "This is all the fault of the patrons" then this is a red flag and such dev should be unsubscribed as soon as possible. "Bad fans", we already heard that.PTSD from the lastest Radiant "beta" update that is going to take the full 14 months to get a full release. There's no way around bad dev pratices and I rather them doing what they've planned and stick with it, improving on the next dev cycle rather than fix mistakes and say its the patrons fault. That said, they do need to plan how to improve speed because I'm not sure a 8 month window per update for 1hour tops is acceptable, especially in this phase.
In addition, many of these people are amateur loners and often make mistakes/burn out/experience writer's block ect...It's always a little different from one dev to another. Different hardware, different experience levels, knowledge, skillsets, aptitudes, etc... And I can be pretty fucking critical when it comes to VNs that I think have shit writing (you know I've had words about SG ). But one thing I'll never do is criticize how long it takes for the Dev to release his or her work. I want to see good art and good writing, and both can take a while to get it right. Sometimes delays for revisions are necessary. So it's important to me that the Dev takes all the time they need and not rush things just because of pressure from some impatient vocal minority.
Option A. We've waited for so long now that the update being ready one month sooner or later doesnt really matter anymore. Finish the update the way you envisioned it. Changing the direction now will just create more chaos. Maybe the way ch. 5 was developed is not the way to go in the future but you can change that from ch. 6 onwards.
You must be registered to see the links
Hello, everyone!
This week we'll focus on the content we have so far, and what still remains to be created. We have passed the point of doubling the content of CH04. In quick numbers, CH05 currently looks like this:
- 2400+ renders (rendered and unrendered).
- 8 lewd animations (unrendered).
The last stretch of work consists of several hundred renders still, mainly remaining scenes of Eve, Bree and Mia.
For a good while now we're been running a big render queue, which has been in the hundreds at times. The animation frames are also all unrendered because we're rendering out the story renders first. There's still a couple of possible animations and some extra angles we'd like to do, but they're in "maybe" territory. We're opting out of cinematic and extra animations until we're able to render 24/7 in the background.
We haven't been fond of making estimations because the render times are a huge impacting factor and there are only so many hours in the day to create new content. Our current render queue for example is "only" about 90 hours if left to render continuously, plus loading times. The animations are far, far in the 100+ hours territory... but we'll look into optimizing that when we reach that point.
At this point it might be obvious what the problem is, and the good news is that we've worked towards fixing it. We are slowly building a 24/7 rendering rig. We've already done a lot of the back-end work to have it functioning with ease when it comes to file sharing, assets and that sort of thing. Our plan has been to get this rig fully functional with the release of CH05.
Choices, choices...
We also had a really long talk about the development time of CH05 and how it took over the content of CH06. We're not really happy about it, and at this point we're not as confident that we made the right call. The longer wait times are coming back around to bite us in the ass... but there's always options to consider.
After thinking it over, we boiled it down to two possible options:
A) Continue creating CH05 as we currently are.
B) Make changes to CH05, moving some scenes to CH06 to release faster.
Option A means the train keeps on chugging, no stops. We finish the evening and night content fully before releasing CH05 exactly as we envisioned it, with no scenes left out. It would still take some time to create, and especially to render. We prefer this option because it's the whole package as we planned it.
Option B means the train switches tracks. We cut the chapter right before the night content starts with the main girls and save those scenes for the next chapter. This obviously means CH05 wouldn't contain all the content we envisioned for it and might end abruptly, but it would enable us to release the chapter much faster.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Regardless, the render queue is popping off and the work continues. On the coding and SFX side of things, work has been a breeze since it's much easier when it doesn't require hundreds of hours of waiting (unless something is seriously wrong). We also edited the script and created more custom morphs for our clothing so the fabric moves more naturally.
Next week we're looking forward to focus on some intimate scenes, and more scripting.
Other news
We published June's special render of Mia earlier today. It's a little camping trip with some strip poker. In case you didn't have a chance to see it yet,You must be registered to see the links
Cheers,
Robison & Npx