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Hey everyone, it's time for another weekly update!
Apart from the usual quick update, this will also be the 1st
status report - a longer post that answers some questions and provides more details about what's been happening lately and what could happen in the future (thanks to ThatGuyArto for the idea).
First of all, the work on
An Evening of Wonders is going well with a lot of new renders made this week. There are only a couple of scenes left to render before I can start working on the animated parts of the game. I'm excited to be getting closer to the finish line, it feels like I came up with the idea for this game years ago and it took me way longer than I thought it would to release it.
And now, let me start the
status report by answering some questions:
Hardware: Currently, I'm doing all rendering and animation work on my PC. I bought it in 2022 thanks to the savings from my first months on Patreon and the scholarship I used to get from my university for having high grades. It has an RTX 3060 graphics card, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, and an Intel Core i5-12400F CPU. Connected to it, I have a 24-inch 1080p Samsung monitor. I also have a laptop that I use mostly for lighter work like writing, editing, and testing the games.
Future hardware plans: If things go well and
An Evening of Wonders isn't a flop, I'm planning on getting a new PC (and a 4K monitor so that I can actually see the 4K wallpapers I'm making in 4K
) at the start of 2025. The dream would be to get an RTX 5080 or even 5090 when they're released, but we'll see if that's gonna be possible. In any case, the new PC would mainly speed things up when it comes to renders and animations (with the current setup a 4-second animation can render for around 20 hours which is a pain to deal with). It would also make creating more complicated scenes and including more characters in renders possible.
Programs I'm using: The renders and animations are created with Daz Studio and the game itself is created with the Ren'Py engine. I don't think anything is going to change when it comes to this since I'm probably only interested in creating visual novels. If I was good at drawing or had the budget to hire an artist, I would probably try to create games with 2D drawings and not the Daz Studio renders, but that's not something I can do in the current circumstances.
Things I want to improve on: There are a couple of things that I want to improve on, especially when it comes to creating animations. Daz Studio isn't great when it comes to animation tools, but there are definitely games with much better-looking animations than the ones I create, so I want to improve in this aspect. A new PC would be of great help here cause I could see and correct the mistakes I make much quicker if the animations didn't take such a long time to render. When it comes to writing, there's also a lot of room for improvement. The difficult part here is that I'm kind of stuck (when it comes to
Tune in to the show) with what's already written so I can't just change things drastically now in the middle of the game, but I'll try to make things a bit better in the future updates.
Ideas for future projects: Don't even get me started
I was always a person with tons of ideas and not enough time/energy to commit to all of them. Currently, apart from
Titts and
AEoW, I have the plot of 3 potential games written down (as in, basically summaries of the plot including the endings) and a few more loose ideas that haven't been fleshed out yet. I do like all of the ideas and I think they have potential, but it's also possible they aren't ever going to be turned into actual games. Two of the already fleshed-out ideas would be games with around 5 episodes each, so it would take like a year and a half to create one of them. The third idea would make a shorter game with only 2 or 3 episodes, but that's also the most 'unusual' of my ideas. I personally love it, but I think it's plausible that a lot of players could hate it, especially people used to the usual adult visual novels. Honestly, if money wasn't a factor, I'd love to work on it, but I have to be realistic and I know that focusing on more 'mainstream' games is most likely a better decision (or, at least, much safer). In any case, the reality is that it's going to take me probably at least another 2 years to even finish
Tune in to the show, so there's not much point in talking about anything else for now.
Income, costs, and savings: I figured that this is something you might wanna know, especially those of you who support me financially. Well, the Patreon income has been steady and it's around $250 per month, a bit more when a new episode releases, a bit less usually. This is a cool amount of money, but on its own, it's not enough to live off of, even in my country. I'm able to work on this full-time only thanks to the income from Steam. My rent is $700 per month, and I've been single since December last year, so I don't split the costs with anyone else and pay the full amount myself. After adding the normal costs of food and everything, plus the taxes and costs of having a single-person company (I had to create one 2 years ago because of the laws in my country), my entire monthly expenses end up being around $1500 or thereabouts. If it wasn't for Steam, I'd probably have to quit game development and focus on a 'normal' career cause I wouldn't be able to survive with just the money I make on Patreon. However, you make the most money on Steam in the first 3 months or so after the game's release, so it's been slowly getting lower and lower as well. That's mostly why I felt like I needed to release
An Evening of Wonders to have the income from two games on Steam at once and feel more secure.
Regrets: Overall, I don't have many regrets and I'm really happy and grateful that I can even earn a living by creating games because it's such a privileged position to be in anyway. However, I do regret not thinking more about the concept of
Tune in to the show before I started making it. It was my first 'big' game so I didn't realise just how long it'll actually take to complete and how big of a commitment it's going to be. I basically just thought that 30 days seemed like a natural amount for a TV show like that and went with it. If I could go back in time, I'd definitely go with 14 days instead and just make changes to the plot accordingly. This was also when I thought I'd just be earning money through Patreon and wasn't even considering Steam being a possibility, so a huge, long-term project seemed like the way to go. If I were to give some advice to new developers, I'd definitely suggest creating smaller games with only a few episodes maximum. It would not only be a better idea from the financial point of view but would also help avoid burnout and just the fact that people change and after years of working on one game, you might not even like the original idea anymore.
In any case, I've been writing for almost two hours, so I think that's enough for one post
I'm not sure how often you can expect the longer status update posts, most likely every few months. I'll also obviously inform you all of anything important in the usual weekly updates. And if you have any questions about anything, feel free to ask them in the comments and I'll try to answer
Anyway, thank you so much for your support and reading, I hope you're all doing well,
RobertDeadth
