Northpx Regarding the progress bar stuff and how to do it going forward, the question can only be answered if we know what the progress bars represent now.
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Hello, everyone!
This week we spent a lot of time working with Eve. Including her special render, which we usually don't mention in the status updates outside of the occasional link in other news. The specials are always a little fun project to work on at the end of the month alongside the normal game renders. Something different. Not entirely canon either, but they could be—especially after the events of SH.
After the Eve scene is done there's only one scene left until we can finally wrap up the render content for this update. Plus any fixes Robison digs up while playtesting, like the mole he is.
Audio
Robison finished the audio setup screen this week. It features a couple of sliders and default buttons to set up your volumes in the beginning of the game. This will be stored in the persistent data so you only need to do it once, and those who continue their saves will be unaffected. It's mostly for new players.
We also found a random bug in CH05 where the volume of a sound effect was about 10x louder than it was supposed to be, which made for a nice little jump scare. It was pretty easy to miss and slipped through testing several times. In case you're curious, you can find it in the Kate scene after you shower, as long as you've been good to Eve too.
Progress bars
We had a very friendly fan this week asking about the progress numbers and why they move so slowly, and his conclusion seemed to be that we're evil incarnate. Or something close to it. But in case you're also wondering, the answer is that they're our shitty estimations. And you shouldn't make your own shitty estimations based on our shitty estimations. Even we don't know exactly when the updates will be done, but 100% means done. Not sooner than that.
It's like the previous update and its glorious swan header that filled in with color slowly over time. Really, really slowly towards the end. I'm sure someone cringes at the memory of those last percentages, like we do... It just seems like the last 20% or so always take the longest.
Maybe we just suck at estimating, which makes it hard for you to interpret our progress. That's our bad. We're not sure how to remedy that for the next development cycle... No progress bars? More progress bars?! An overall percentage? Go back to the old lists...?
Opinions welcome.
Other news
May's special featuring Eve and her thick thighs dropped earlier today!You don't have permission to view the spoiler content. Log in or register now.
Cheers and have a comfy weekend!
Robison & Npx
I'll take renders as an example: At some points in this dev cycle, some weeks saw 7/8% progress there and now we're on to 1% weeks, so what are the % supposed to represent and what changed? Were you doing 100 renders a week at some point and are now only doing 15 (the numbers are examples), or are you always doing roughly the same but the number of total and remaining renders kept growing? Or were the percentages always just a guesstimate rather than tied to a target number?
Personally I think an ideal progress bar would be a per "scene" progress. Again with renders as an example, the progress bar would say "Scenes rendered: X/Y", with X being the scenes that have been fully rendered and Y being the total planned scenes. If you find yourself adding a scene or five mid-dev cycle, you add them to Y and that's fine. If the last few scenes take longer, mention in the dev log that this or that scene is proving to be challenging and again that's fine (unless the last scene takes 4 months, of course). Then we have a concrete number to keep track on instead of somewhat nebulous percentages. And of course, do the same for "Scenes written/Scenes animated/Scenes coded in/...".
Just my grain of sand, anyway.
