Episode 4 - Post release and development

Hello people!

I hope you all enjoyed the latest release and that I left you with a little bit of a "WTF" by the end of it (in a good way!). I wouldn't be me, if I didn't do that you... 😁. The Christmas holidays are now over, and I unfortunately didn't have much of a break trying to get this release ready and all that. After the family visits, I also fell very ill. But I finished it, and released anyway. Then my wife got very ill, so not a great start to the new year! 😅

-Patch and Android release
So, what's been happening and what's going to happen moving forward? Well, a lot! I've got a patched version ready (v4.1) that fixes a lot of tiny little things and some dialogue improvements (many thanks, Doovel!). I'll release that first somewhere in the next couple of days. Jeevant has created another Android port, which is currently being tested. Unfortunately, it breaks the entire game at certain points. We'll try to iron out these things before releasing that, but that may take a bit of time.

-Development insights
I rendered this episode with UE5.3, and stuck with it through the entire cycle. The engine received two more updates in the meantime, so I jumped straight into upgrading to UE5.5. I spent a couple of days testing it, found it had a couple of bugs, but also figured out work arounds for those bugs. It's all good now and safe to move forward with. It's slightly faster, and many features have been branded as now being production ready.

I've had some ideas on how to improve certain things in my pipeline, and already started doing so. One of those things is taking a more modular approach to character makeup. Previously, I simply added another texture that replaces the character faces with a makeup version. I've added some shader functionality that allows for loading in masks for eyeshadow, eyeliner, lipstick, lipliner and blush and allows me to individually control those with colors, intensity and roughness. Having this kind of functionality allows me to build more specific things, and keep it flexible enough to change, without having to jump into Substance Painter, paint makeup, and re-export new textures all the time. This saves both on VRAM (loading less unique textures) and time, as I can do everything within the engine.

Part of why the previous release took so long, is because I needed to overhaul the entire character system, and completely decouple from DAZ. It took ages to do so, but the end result was worth it. At least, I hope you can see the quality increase compared to the previous episodes. It's not perfect, and I've made mistakes as I went along. But all of those mistakes can be improved in future releases, and it'll only get better.

On top of that, I also got other things working, like being able to use the render qeue. In previous release, I made the scenes, rendered in the viewport, and took a screenshot. It was a terrible workflow, where I had to sit at my machine and manually render each individual shot, each night. This cycle, I spend my evening hours working on the scenes, and let them render overnight while I slept.

-Retrospect
Since release, I've had a lot of thought about what I still needed to do. When I first started this back in 2021, I didn't know anyone or had a clue how this was all going to go down. Fast forward to today, I've met countless of other wonderful developers (many which also became supporters and are here with us) with whom I exchanged ideas, insights, how certain things went for them, their experiences, etc.etc. All I knew back then was creating this, setting up a Patreon and Itch, and hope for the best. I set an internal goal with a minimum viable amount to allow me to keep going, without it being a gigantic sinking money-pit. I'm very happy to see that that amount has surpassed slightly this release! In terms of the bigger players in this space, it's comparatively very small, but it's enough for me to keep going , and make the necesary improvements and hardware upgrades. It's very motivating to see that there's enough love for this project and that people want to see it continue.

-Future
One of the things I couldn't or didn't anticipate, was the importance of releasing this on Steam. It never even crossed my mind when I started. I briefly mentioned it before in a previous devlog, but now's the time to touch down on that a bit more in detail. The longer I keep developing as is, the harder it will become for me to be able to release on Steam. This is something I'll have to tackle first, before continuing with Episode 5. So, what does that mean for development?

I naively did some things I shouldn't have ever done. It's doubly stupid, because I know very well that nobody should be doing these things because of my job. But I did them anyway... I'm talking about using copyrighted and trademarked material. As you know, from episode 2 onwards, the MC sets up his new dorm room and hangs up some posters. These posters, are of real people. I don't have permission from those people or record labels to use them, so they must be removed/replaced. I'm also still using two songs I wasn't able to obtain a license for, they also must be replaced (but that's fairly easy). Good news is, we get to keep the best track, which in my opinion is the EP3 band song.

Now, the earlier episodes are quite frankly, ugly as fuck, and don't show the game in its best light (quite literally) and resolution. Since the engine has been upgraded, I can no longer go back to the old quality. So, I've decided to bring the older episodes up to par with EP4 at the same time. Luckily, the episodes aren't as massive as Episode 4, but it's also not an insignifcant amount of work either. I'll also be adding some features and scenes that I decided to cut, due to time constraints and try to rewrite/remove a few things that I absolutely loathe. The project itself is very unique and quite niche, so I have to try and show it as best I can in any way possible to ensure more of its success.

I'll try to figure out all the bits and pieces of getting it running on Steam, and then I'll probably come back for a whip-around asking for wishlistists and all that.

Thanks for all your support! ❤️

Ezy