Why does it take so long?
Added 2018-03-30 00:48:55 +0000 UTC
Hi folks! I'm still running trying to catch up with the planned schedule. I know a month is a quite long time to produce content, but my little 'project staff' has some peculiarities.
Let me write a quick rant about it:
- Art (by The Architect): I carefully work in each one of the game's sprites and CG. It's not a simply load-pose-render workflow. Assets are acquired from various sources and each texture and material is fine tuned and customized to match an unified visual style for the game. I modeled half of the game sceneries from scratch because most DAZ scenery available have very poor quality or so high polycount that crashes my computer. I set up custom lighting for each scene, also trying to keep the visual style. I 3D sculpt fixes in several meshes on Blender before rendering: fixing clothes positioning, ugly clippings, adjusting and animating hair, etc, etc, etc... I also do a lot of post work on the rendered images. I think I'll try real time 3D next project because I have OCD when it comes to 3DCG production.
- Writing (by The Architect): writing a branching story, in your second language, making meaninful checks and scoring of D.I.C.K. and corruption/love is not easy. I started the project with an overall idea of the entire plot and its possible endings, but translating this to a script file scene take a quite amount of thinking.
- Programming (by The Architect): I love programming. Lots of programming work I reused from the VN engine I wrote for HnS1. Now programming takes more time when I have to fix some UI system and of course in minigames. Minigames are fun to create but they are also the most common source of bugs and problems. Most time spent on programing is designing, balancing and polishing them.
- Revision and proof read (by SmileyFaceGuy): He is great! The game wouldn't be the same without him!
So... It's one guy working on the 3 main roles during the free intervals between a 9-5 job and a daily time spent with the few real people that worth it. I'd love some day to team up with some nice people in a bigger project (are you interested?).
Now, what really matters is:
VERSION 0.6 ROADMAP
[100%] Input issues and aspect ratio fixes
[100%] DAY 3 start scenes and free roam
[100%] Lost and Found quest scene
[ 50%] Revenge Cheat quest scene
[ 60%] Testing and text revisions
I'm still trying to release at the weekend, or maybe a couple of days after...