Hello. After reading the last few pages
Thanks for your feedback! Indeed the game revolves quite heavily against interactions with Juliana, this was always the intention with the game too so we don't want to strafe away from that too much or it... really kinda doesn't make any sense with the story. There are some skippable interractions but they also lead to some content that you don't get to see unless you go with the so called "Juliana path". Most if not all characters future interractions do also depend on your previous choices, not only with that character but also with some other dynamics, this will be more expanded upon as we move forward.
Regarding animations, first of all animations weren't actually planned to be added in the game until we reached a much higher support level, due to the fact that it requires quite the render machine to pull off good long animations.
Due to the fact that our support levels were not rising as expected, we decided to showcase a bit more with animations in the game in order to gain more support, and showcase the potential of it when motkeyz has the right tools. The problem right now is that it takes so long to render these 1080p animations so we have to compromise and make them shorter.
So the reason why animations are short right now is strictly really due to hardware constraints, mot is already running on two 1080Ti's and it's basically been running non-stop since the launch of timestamps, day and night (day for rigging and rendering, and night for rendering all the images and animations in queue). Frankly his PC is more and more starting to give up after this long abuse, It's working really hard. Ideally he needs a separate dedicated render farm to be able to much more reliably and faster push out these high quality renders.
You may notice this a bit with some of the first animations that the framerate was more unpredictable in some cases and the editing to do as much as possible with less, really to bring you as much as possible with the tools that we have at our disposal.
Again motkeyz is also fairly new to animating, but he is learning more and more as he goes, you can clearly see that as well for every release, and you will definitely also see it in the upcoming one.
In regards to having the game in 3d and animating, that requires a totally different set of skills, first of all we don't want to go that way due to it restricting people from playing, having a high quality model doing animations like that requires a lot of hardware from the player. Our animations are made with video files and hence it requires almost no processing power. If you look at games like the twist you can really see he went a lot lower poly on the models, and people still lag their assess off. My 780m before it broke lagged already when navigating between the houses, works well on my 970 though. That also requires a 3d modeller and a 3d animator as well as 3d enviromental artists etc. Totally different set of tools.
In regards to the game running sluggish, I am aware that the last release had a performance issue related to the dialogue history. The dialogue history had no cap on how much was stored in there, which i thought was fine on my PC. I have now tweaked it down to max 20 history lines, which has removed that slugishness completely.
The only other problem with performance we have had is regarding the save and load menu if you have a lot of saves, due to the fact that it loads all thumbnails at once, improvements on this will be made, it's been planned for quite some time, but there are so many other priorities.
Regarding the drum scenes those were just added as fun easter eggs, we will probably expand even more on this later in some ways
In regards to choices etc, i agree with you on many points, I also think we are doing much of it and have a lot planned but it's hard to show all of it so early in the story, seeing as we're only on day 5-6, only recently you really started to see differences happening with options.
The game itself is designed to be more linear than many other games, mainly because we have a personal preference against the too grindy games where you have to constantly click and navigate around and find the right timeslot and all that to trigger some scenes, or weekday etc.
You could say that this is just our style of making the game, not to restrict ourselves in any way, as we discover ways to make things better as we go, and we have some different plans as well for future chapters. We can't change too much of the fundamentals without having to rework a lot of the past.
So in summary; with the restricted funding and support with have right now we are overworking ourselves to show what we are capable of, it's a passion project for us. The game is focused around juliana but with a lot of things around it planned, even if some aspects of the game feels like on rails i don't think you can predict everything we have in store
Hopefully in due time we can really make it as we want, nothing stops us from at a later stage also re-define some older content to improve it once we have better tools at our disposal.
Thanks again for your valuable input!
/A
