Progress Report - Various

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Reminder! The polls to determine which game will follow up Chastity Quest are underway! There are polls for both the Public and Patrons Only. Make sure you vote!

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Alright! With that reminder out of the way, time for a quick progress report. 

Chastity Quest

I've finished the second of three endings, this one the Default Path that occurs if Kiralia is neither strongly dominant or strongly submissive. This second ending only took a touch over three days, whereas the first took almost six, showing the point I pointedly pointed out in the last update rather clearly. That first one took the most time mostly do to a lot of establishing shots being needed.

Anyway, I actually finished the second ending's stuff a day ago. Last evening I was starting in on the final of the three possible endings (the Submissive Ending). I'm expecting this one to take maybe four days total, as it doesn't share as many assets with the other endings. I managed to complete most of the asset capture this evening/early morning. I have a bit more asset capture to do before moving on to editing, then code implementation/writing. The overall picture, however, is that things are looking fairly on course so far.

Comic

I've gotten a handful of renders done. Currently it's not progressing quite as quickly as I'd like, but not to a worrying level yet. Mostly just an issue where I've needed to re-render more than usual, due to working with new assets. I don't currently anticipate any major delays with it.

Short Story

Honestly? I haven't touched it yet. Too many other things being juggled at the moment.

Animation Tests

I'd actually been hoping to show a bit more progress on this. I've only been able to spend dribs and drabs of time on it of course, but the next step was supposed to be an easy one. Basically, I'm just working out the most efficient way to get animations working. I can't render entire backgrounds with the animating figures, as the memory drain that takes means spending upwards of a day and a half on one short animation, render time wise. As such, I'm intending to make use of the same trick virtually every movie (and many games) have used in the last 40+ years. That being compositing. Essentially, separating the background layer from the character layer and only animating the character layer. It's definitely not rocket science...but it's something I've never done before, hence needing to learn. 

Unfortunately, the learning curve has proven slightly longer than I'd expected. Less for the actual compositing, and more for figuring out file types and some issues with lighting for the composited images. My initial couple of animations attempts didn't include an alpha channel, which meant needing to redo things a couple of times. As such, I'm still playing with it. Hopefully, I'll have an example of it by the next progress report!