DevLog Update

Aight folks, we're back with another check-in on the next Revamp update. I still got plenty to do today so let's jump right in and review where things are at.

Just like last time, i'm increasingly more aware that many of you haven't played through the entire story so I'm going to avoid spoilers here and talk generically about some of the environments.

Quick Recap if you Missed the Last DevLog

If you missed the last DevLog, this next update has several new environments in it-- meaning the characters are going to be places they've never been before. Since the Revamp has included a glow-up to many scenes in the game, it made sense to redesign some of these environments to really make them stand out from the original. Chapter 6 is a tough act to follow and while the beginning of Chapter 7 was fun for a lot of people, I always felt like it could have been a lot better. The solution to that is to make these new environments really shine-- buuuuut that's been a ton of extra work.

Writing

I reviewed this part in the last log but I'll quickly confirm that the writing for v15 is mostly done. We will be seeing some polish and some reorganization to some lines in the dialogue but overall, many of you probably won't even notice. There's just not a ton of work to do here so it's not really something I've had to focus on. Most has just been an easy copy/paste.

CGs

This is the massive percentage of the work. If you don't follow me on Bluesky, I've recently admitted that v15 has a lot of images-- so much, in fact, that it's been on track to set the biggest image record ever (which is currently held by v20 of the original at 712 pics). Right now I have 486 pics rendered and in the folder and there's quite a bit left to do.

As with the last DevLog, rather than give an overall percentage of completion, this time I'm just going to break the update down by the number of scenes and let you know where each is currently at.

Scene 1: All pics and writing completely finished and includes one animation

Scene 2: Completely finished. New environment completely revamped and has been teased here and here with 3x the images of the original.

Scene 3: Completely finished. Two new environments that have been completely redone and were teased here and here. 

Scene 4: Completely finished. One new environment completely rebuilt and jumped from 31 images in the original to 90 images in the Revamp. I haven't shown any pics from this yet as I just completed it last weekend but we will be seeing some teasers and Before/After pics so you know that I've been putting in the hours.

Scene 5: This is where I'm currently at as of today. This is a new environment that needed some work. That being said, I got stuck as hell on this for 3 days trying to fix stuff. The good news is that I got out of the slump and got things working now. I'm currently doing item placement to help fill the scene out. If you played the original game, this scene looked ok but when I started looking at it, it really reminded me of Scene 3. It was just suuuuuper empty. I should be showing some teasers of it eventually but i don't have any actual renders done yet. I should hopefully finish having the scene built by tomorrow then I can start doing shoots. This scene isn't overly long but I do want more life in it than what we saw in the original. The bulk of that is going to come from just filling out the scene with items and hopefully a lot of the same mannerisms that we've seen in the Revamp already. I'll admit to being frustrated on this scene for the past few days but I'm optimistic again now.

Scene 6: Haven't started on this one yet. The good news is that it'll be a return to familiar sets so there's no prep work to do here like the bulk of this update required. That being said, I do have some goals in mind to try and improve things but I haven't started on that project yet so stay tuned. It's not an overly long scene either so I'm hoping to at least be able to reuse existing shots as a base to build from. that should help speed things up.

So that's where we are. I know this one may seem like it's taking longer-- at least it does to me-- but there's definitely reasons for that and hopefully you'll understand why once I get it out to you. So please stay tuned and if you were a fan of this particular section of the story in the original, you're gonna be blown away by how much better things look in the Revamp.

As always, thank you so much from the bottom of my little gamedev heart. I seriously appreciate each and every one of you on a daily basis. thank you for letting me come into your homes to share this entire experience. it really means the world to me.

-Aaryn