View attachment 3642787
Hey everyone,
this Dev Log is going to be a bit longer because there will be some news regarding the Steam release at the end.
To make sure everyone reads it: The Steam stuff is completely unrelated to the Patreon version!
This week has been pretty productive in general. No nasty surprises, no setbacks, and not a lot of other appointments outside the usual stuff.
I was able to focus on setting up the environment and renders for the scene I wrote last week.
Setting up the environment went surprisingly smoothly. I expected it to take a lot more time to get something close to what I had in mind.
You can see some parts of it in this week's preview renders.
And the good thing is, almost half of the remaining scenes take place in that environment so I can focus on writing and rendering them instead of searching for fitting assets.
Speaking of scenes, I started planning out the remaining scenes (organizing the story stuff into game scenes/settings).
There's still quite a lot of stuff left to do for Chapter 5 even if I have all environments except one (the one for the Chapter finale) set up now.
I think the pacing of a story is very important and that's especially true for Chapter 5. The story just needs time here and it'll be counter-productive to rush it.
So yes, Chapter 5 will be the biggest one to date, we already reached the size of Chapter 4 this week.
The numbers for this week:
114 new static renders for a total of 1678
1 new animation for a total of 37
250 new lines in the script file for a total of 4570
Onwards to the Steam topic...
As some of you already noticed, the Steam release was set for June 25th. To make it short: I pushed it to September.
When I set up the store page, I had to provide two dates for Steam, 1 for technical reasons (not public), and one that is shown to the public.
The technical date has to be specific and I roughly guessed when I might be able to release the Steam version.
The public date can be set to "To be announced"... which I did back then. Until I realized that doing so prevents you from showing up on the "Coming Soon" store pages.
You need to set a public date to show up there, so I just used the technical date because that was still my goal for the release.
As you probably can guess from the text above, the end of June isn't realistic for the release anymore.
So why September?
Steam Summer Sale. It starts on June 27th and runs until July 11th. And as a small dev, you absolutely don't want to release in that time frame.
Hardly anybody will buy an unknown AVN when they can get the latest Assassin's Creed at 70% off and stuff.
Even June 25th as a release date was way too close to the Summer Sale.
The same is true for the weeks after the Summer Sale: everyone spent their money on the Summer Sale, so you don't want to release within the next 3-4 weeks after the sale ends.
That would put the release into mid-August... when I'm away with the family for 2 weeks.
The next realistic release date after mid-June is early September for me.
Trust me, I'd want to get it out as soon as possible, but given the circumstances, any release before September would just be a stupid idea.
I'll set up a specific date in September when I'm done with Chapter 5 and the Steam version so the next date you see there will be the definitive date for the release.
I'm sorry for the inconvenience and the disappointment but I just had hardly any clue what I was doing when I set up all the Steam stuff.
And you can see why I usually don't give release dates: way too much potential for trouble.
As I said before, that's only affecting the Steam release. The Patreon version will be released as soon as it's done.
And no, I won't give a date for that... lesson learned. ;-)
Have a nice weekend, guys.
Cheers,
Ceolag
