Dev Diary #5
Hi folks. I would like to start this diary by explaining our workflow and pointing out the obstacles we are encountering on a daily basis so that you can understand the reasons behind the delays we had. You can skip the long wall of text and go directly below to the TLDR section if you don't want to have behind the scenes info about the development and read about the current state there.
As you guys can guess, I am using DAZ Studio to create our visuals. Studio is a good framework and relatively easy to pick up. That being said, if you are trying to create ambitious stuff with it, there will be endless problems you will encounter. In Family Business, I am using a real 3D house model that I've made in MAYA. I have then created the textures with Substance Designer + Painter and merged them in DAZ Studio environment. On the plus side, we have a realistic house model with actual structure meaning, you won't see useless doors leading nowhere or strange connection between rooms and such. Every location will be placed realistically. On the downside, it is a huge problem to work on individual rooms since everything is connected. Now, most of the artists out there just load a room and work within it. Thats mostly why we almost never see movement between two different locations in visual novels. Not being able to divide rooms is both a good thing and a bad thing.
Which brings us to our second visual problem. Simulation. Most of the outfits and fabrics you will see in our game will be simulated according to real world physics and making those simulations most of the time takes longer than the rendering processes. In my workflow, I design the characters outfit on a different DAZ instance. Save the outfitted version and load that into the house. After that, I play with the fabric textures to fine tune them specifically for the lighting setup I am planning to use. When everything is ready to start the actual work, I move to posing. After carefully crafting each individual pose, I run the simulation and simulate the outfit over the transition animation. This pipeline is repeated for every single render you will see in our game. That is the main reason why our visual process is going slower than we have anticipated. We want to make the experience as realistic as possible and losing the clothing simulation will impact the immersion we are aiming for tremendously.
On the last note, I would like to point out that this demo will not be a teaser demo. In fact, it is a really big one. One of our events have over 160 lines of dialogue and almost 100 individual images. There will be 6 big events in the demo so do the math.
About the mechanical side of things, my partner is having problems with renpy constantly but that is mostly because we are trying to achieve something really out of renpy's limitations. Thanks to renpy, every once in a while Numinous writes 100 lines of code to achieve the effect of a single line of python script. He is hoping that renpy will have an update addressing those issues but who knows...
(Current Status) TLDR: We are currently polishing the product and will be out soon. Meanwhile I am rendering revised versions of some scenes and fine tuning the script as we proceed. We are terribly sorry that this is taking too long but to be fair, this is our first game project and we believe we are doing everything we can to deliver our vision to you guys. As always, thank you guys so much for your support. Stay tuned o/
