Surprisingly not abandoned.

First of all, I can't stress this enough, but MW is NEVER going to be abandoned. 

Being a game dev is my lifelong dream. I've got the opportunity to set foot in a more welcoming territory/genre and make a story I'm invested in and deeply in love with. The only way I'd stop working on Mad World would be if I died, or a terrible life experience took me away from it. Sure, development may get slow at times, but I'm probably dealing with something else that requires my dev time. 

Seeing that my game got the "abandoned" tag really bummed me out, but I can't really blame anyone but myself for it. F95 staff can't check every single Discord for every game on the site, and I'm not that great at making update posts.

Truth is, I'm in a tough spot right now and my mood is in the gutter. I couldn't bring myself to make yet another post saying words and showing nothing concrete, so I shut myself out for a moment until I got something I could show you guys - which I now do. 

Working on the game was hard enough back when I wasn't making a 1400-render update with new systems and wasn't borrowing money to keep the lights on, but now, I've been met with new issues.

If you're a developer in F95, you're probably familiar with F95's render farm, which they made freely available for developers with poor hardware (like me). Thing is, the complexity and quantity of the scenes have made me highly dependent on the render farm to finish this update.

There's only one small problem - the render farm won't work with DAZ Studio 4.15 (my render software, and current version), only with DAZ 4.20. Remember when I said I was working with all-new lighting methods? Yeah, they use kilocandela, or kc/d for luminance units, which won't work in DAZ Studio 4.20. 

What happens is, I've been relighting roughly around 800 scenes so I can upload them to the render server, because my hardware is simply not equipped to handle anything fancier. 

Here's the punchline: My computer even CRASHED a few times while uploading scenes to the render farm. I've done this process over 400 times, and it's still faster than rendering all of them locally on my own computer, can you believe that? That's how  i̶n̶f̶u̶r̶i̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g precarious things are.

Ironically enough, even with all the frustration, working on the game has been doing wonders for my mood. I like making characters, creating the rules and scenarios, and letting them act on it. I love writing, and I'm pouring my heart into this game.

Render count

A noteworthy thing is that the render count has tripled compared to the last update. Attached, you can see the comparison between Chapter 3.3 and Chapter 4 scene files. The scene complexity and quantity™ have caused the file size to be almost 15 times larger than Chapter 3.3, since there are more animations, more people on-screen, etcetera.

Keep in mind that these are only the scene files (which are one scene, and one thumbnail), not the renders. Render count should be roughly around 1400, and nowhere near 44 gigs.

Chapter preview

In the images attached, you can see some chapter previews. They are not final and may be either cut or undergo some processing before release. You can see some of the new lighting and environment-building techniques I'm using.

The delay

The main factor delaying this update for so long is that I'm putting all my chips on it to give my game some more attention. Compared to other similar games released in the same year as mine, Mad World hasn't really done much to earn people's love. I know it's self-sabotage to compare myself to others, but I can't help but feel like I'm doing something wrong. That's why I'm putting extra work on pretty much soft-relaunching the game. Seeing as many people will be replaying the game from the start, it could use a little work. More supporters mean I could start saving for new hardware and leave all of this rendering hassle behind (a man can dream, right?).

Last, but not least, I'm striving for a May 4th release. I know - I KNOW I said I wouldn't create ass-pulled release windows anymore, so I'll ask that you please don't get your hopes up. May 4th is merely the date I'm crunching towards, and it does not represent an actual release date.

I am, without a doubt, still at it.