28/07/2024 - Weekly Dev-Log #8
- 1,411 renders
- 24,542 words
- 36 choices
- 40 animations
Spent quite a bit of time fixing up older renders, which is why the progress isn't as substantial as usual.
I also have quite a bit to talk about in today's dev-log.
Render Settings:
Previously, I would render each render to 3000 iterations and each animation frame to 1000 iterations. Just ask any other dev - this number is quite low. The reason why I had it this low was to optimise for speed, and for most scenes it was fine. However, there were a few scenes in which the renders were a bit... pixelated. They needed more time in the oven so to speak.
Hence, I changed from rendering until I've reached a specific number of iterations to rendering until a certain quality. For those who are interested, the new stop point is a 99% render converged ratio and a 3 render quality. What this means is that for some scenes, they might reach this end point after 3000 iterations, while other scenes may reach that end point at 22000 iterations.
Hence, render time will be increasing, but hopefully I won't have to re-render any more images because they didn't spend enough time in the oven. Here's one render I had to re-render during the week:
Vitious:
In a previous dev-log, I mentioned Vitious was initially planned as a Side Girl, yet I really liked her character, so I was considering making her a Side LI. However, in recent weeks, she has become my favourite character in Tides of Succession - if I had to choose which LI to pursue, I would choose her. I found myself wishing she was a main LI... if only I had the power to make her a main LI...
So now, she is a main LI - purely because I like her. I am the developer, so deal with it
. What this means is now she'll have more screentime. Because of this, I've added in a "forced" scene (not a lewd scene - for clarification. And by forced I mean you can't avoid the scene via branching.) with her at the start, as she does reside in Rochdale (which is where MC is at the start of the AVN).
Rhys:
It's pronounced "rice" not "reece". Anyway, Rhys is Vitious's 8 year old son. His very existence is baffling - if you read the dev-log two weeks ago, you would know spice deviants are a "race" of humans who have lost their spice, making them very weak, and less intelligent as well as a lack of self-control. Because of this, once a human loses the vast majority of spice, and they become a spice deviant, it's more than likely they don't survive the year. So the fact that one of them survived long enough to give birth to a child, and then raise the child until they were 8 is odd.
Anyway, the MC meets Rhys during the Vitious scene I mentioned earlier. Here's a render of Vitious and Rhys...
Changes to the Development Process:
In other big news, I've also changed my development process. I've already mapped out a skeleton of the entire story (which I still make occasional minor tweaks too - such as adding Vitious as a main LI), as well as outline all the scenes I have planned for Chapter 1. In this outline, I would have written down the purpose of each scene, as well as the key points I want to mention during the scene. After that, I would then just pick a scene, and write and render at the same time.
Originally, this worked great... but recently, I've been facing a little bit of a creative block. So, if progress were to continue without stalling every line, trying to design the next render or write the next line, I needed to change something. So I changed something.
Now, I write, and then render afterwards. What this means is I'm only focusing on one thing at a time so my brain isn't constantly jumping between visuals and writing.
Playtesting Version:
Ages away... It is honestly looking like it will have somewhere ~2.2k renders in the next playtesting version. And I'm doing on average 180 renders per week, so since I need to do ~800 more renders... that is roughly 4.44, which we'll round to 5 weeks. And then I of course need to do all my playtesting, so I'll add another week on for that, so 6 weeks from now.
Which puts it at roughly... 8th of September - next playtester version!
Public Version:
To clarify, that's the playtesting version only. After I've done that, I've then got another block of 1000 renders to do... before I reach the "half-way" mark of the Chapter. Which puts the half-way mark at ~3.2k renders...
. Honestly, at that point I may just call it Chapter One and release it... but we'll see what happens. I think the point of all this is there's going to be many more dev-logs before Tides of Succession is released. So don't get too excited just yet.
Walkthrough:
Last week, I flagged the possibility of discussing why you won't need a walkthrough to play Tides of Succession. That was because at the time, I thought I would have nothing to discuss this week apart from "more progress". Alas, a lot can happen in a week... so next week I'll discuss it.
What I will say, is at this moment of time, I have committed to making a walkthrough - even though in my opinion, you shouldn't play with a walkthrough for Tides of Succession. Part of why I also decided to make my own is because I pity the poor soul who would have to make a walkthrough for ToS... It would take a lot of effort to do.
