Envy isn't the right word, perhaps jealousy, but more disdain. There are many active devs who have much inferior setups to his and slave away month after month, grinding out 20-30 min renders just to amass enough to call an honest update. And they keep producing. It's disrespectful to them to treat him otherwise(particularly because he keeps talking about it, you dont need a6000s bro, you need to spend a few weekends posing and rendering).You know bro, to me, a bad work ethic looks like a yellow "abandoned" badge next to a game's title while its developer has changed their username (or even kept the old one) and started working on something else, or disappeared without a trace, or could not cope with the difficulties along the way and gave up.
I also like digging into numbers. And you know, Ocean creates approximately 4000 static renders (counting both games) per year. And in the past years, only a few devs were able to achieve similar quality of renders, but in the recent year more games have appeared with rendering quality quite close to Ocean's.
But they can't yet come close to his number of static renders. 4K per year is much more than these ~200-300 renders in 2-3 months of regular updates from the devs who I was referred to as an example of the right approach to the game development.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against these devs, I enjoy their games. But personally, in these games, I save updates for a year before playing, because such small updates are just annoying and ruin the experience of even a great game.
And maybe I'm wrong, but I've read in your statement a bit of envy about the 4 times better system specs.
But it wasn't a godsend for him, bro. Just imagine the amount of crap they dumped on him when he was writing for many months in dev logs about the bottlenecks in his current hardware, how he dealt with them, and his plans to upgrade. "What the hell, the current hardware is enough, I’m already tired of his whining about need of the new hardware. It would be better if he thought about adding my favorite furry content (or whatever they demanded then) than to be distracted by some irrelevant nonsense."
So yes, he is investing a certain share of his revenue into a top notch hardware. In my book, this looks like a pro point for the dev.
Either way, it's great that you're going to make a game yourself. It will be interesting to read about your experience if you decide to share it. Who knows, maybe you can do better and other developers can learn a thing or two from ya.
For sure I can see the perfectionist, but that's not a good thing. Any college class I had a failing semester in wasn't one of disinterest, but rather spending time trying to reinvent the wheel instead of just going through the (admittedly less engaging) drudgery in front of me. That's part of life, that's part of work. He has the tools, he has the talent, he just needs to produce.Another water is wet thing: Ocean is a perfectionist who overthinks. When I play the end result (ie a new WiaB update) I can't tell how many renders never got seen by players because Ocean was unhappy with the results. All I get is the update, and it's engaging (to me). My point (if I have one) is that after something is released, we only see the end result, which is the tip of the iceberg. Ocean's overthinking is both an asset and a curse. We only have the smallest window into his dev process. It's all part and parcel; the game wouldn't be the same if OCean wasn't the person he is - Ocean actually has to over think (and not just be a person in front of a computer churning out renders) to personalise the character's mannerisms to be convincing. So as much as his VN's are a 'product', they'll never be released on time if they don't meet the standard he's set. THere are too many VN's where the characters have 100% identical mannerisms, it's so obvious that the narrator is talking and the characters are puppets. Ocean's at least managed to develop the personalities of his characters a bit more, probably by over thinking whether they like sweet or spicy.
Frustrating, but after each release I find more reasons to be patient to see how it turns out.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go post a fan art in another thread for which I spent the last 4 hours on perfecting a dforce prop
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