Health & Game Status Update – October 24, 2020
(as posted on our Patreon Page)
Hi Everyone, I just wanted to provide all of you an update to my current condition and health status!
I am now 13 days post-surgical status and doing much, much better. As of right now, I have been off of any pain medication for almost 3 days, the longest that I’ve actually been able to go now for almost a year… so, that is really great
NEWS and it is good to not be so muddle headed during the day.
I’ve been able to sit at the computer (for about 2 hours a day, 3 if I push it and have the wife yell at me for overdoing things) and I’ve been able to do
SOME artwork for the game… granted, they are
SPRITES for dialogue work, but have managed get close 400 of them rendered out so far…
While preparing, undergoing and healing from the back surgery, I spent a lot of time talking with
Epadder and
Sierra3, a lot of that time was spent outlining for them the direction of the games in case anything unfortunate happened to me… earlier, this year, the adult gaming community lost a creator (Palmer) who passed away and his creative team and their futures and those of the games that their fans loved became uncertain because of that…
…we didn’t want the possibility of the same thing happening with our game, or to our fans… so we spent a lot of time discussing how they would be able to proceed without me and how they could keep things moving forward if something should happen to me.
Another thing we discussed heavily amongst us, was plotting out how we could produce things for the game more efficiently, so that I could spend the time I need in post-surgical rehabilitation and still produce a timely release for
YOU the fans and our supporters…
…one way we latched upon… using
Character Sprites, like in most Japanese Visual Novels, for in-game dialogues for the characters that you’ll interact and speak to in the game (as shown with Claire in the examples below).
Each character sprite, will have a total of 15 different conversation poses done in 3 ways… Face Forward, Faced Left and Faced Right… and with each of the 15 different poses, there will be 10 different emotions the character can have with 3 variations of each emotion… so, for every Character Sprite (and outfit that they wear) there will be a total of 1,350 different renders and variations that can be used for in-game dialogue sections with that character.
We will employ with those character sprites, within the game, shaders to change the lighting of both the characters to simulate the changes to time in the day while playing the game… as well. So, the above examples would look different with a “Night-time” or “Afternoon” employed on it.
Each Character Sprite will be reusable throughout the game, meaning that I won’t have to re-render a character unless their outfit or status of their outfit changes (like Claire in the above example removing her skirt or shirt).
While this is a
LOT of initial work for each character to start, in the long run it will save me
HUGE amounts of time! For example currently, I would have to dress, pose and render Claire in the scene of the story of her saying just “
HELLO” to you the player in the game… a scene that could take me almost an hour to set up and render just for that brief moment… whereas, doing it as a Character Sprite, I only have to render the Character Sprite once, on a transparent background, which takes me a minute to render, render a background location (which can also be reused for dialogue scenes) that takes me 20 minutes to render) and just overlay that Character Sprite on the reusable background, have the game software (through programming) do the shader to simulate the time of day and that entire process can be reused over and over again throughout the course of the game… I never have to render it again!
This allows me more time to focus on writing, as well as, doing only dramatic scenes or sex scene renders instead and, eventually, add animations to the game.
As I said, at the start, it is a lot more renders to do… but the renders take much less time to do this way (as layers) for dialogue or blah, blah, blah sections of the game… but, once done, they are reusable over and over again, unless the character has a different outfit that they are wearing in the story… but can be quickly rendered for that outfit change, versus the current way that I’ve been doing dialogue sections of the game.
Anyhow, that is what I’ve been working on (
Character Dialogue Sprite renders) while I’ve been healing up, focusing on the next batch of characters that you will meet in the next few releases in the game… once rendered, I will never have to do those again and they can be reused over the course of the game story and when I am better, all I will need to do is render the dramatic scenes and sex scenes of that chapter release with those characters.
Our
GOAL in doing this is to get us to a point where we can release the game once a month for you, our players, and increase storyline production and game release schedules for all of you.
OK… time for me to sign off, get back to the ice pack for a while and then get back to churning out Character Sprites. I hope that you all have a good weekend and were able to grasp what I’ve been trying to explain, if not, please feel free to ask and I will clarify for you!
Take care, thanks so much for the continued devotion and support that you’ve been showing us and we’ll talk again soon!
~Jack