A Day in the Life of an Indie Dev...

I got Sam's skirt as short as I possibly could!

Based on the poll results I'd like to write a little something about a standard day for me during the development cycle for One Day at a Time. I have a minute to breathe while I'm waiting on some postwork to finish. So, I though I'd tell you a little bit about my process.

I wake up around 8am (this is subject to change as my sleep is all over the place but regardless of when I wake up, this is the amount of time that goes into it). I usually start with writing if I don't already have a backlog. That will take me until around 12pm to finish a scene or two. Give or take depending on the size.

After that I'll move to setting up scenes or animating if the scene calls for it. That's normally my process. Sometimes I'll animate when I'm in the mood, so it would throw this whole schedule off, but that's the outlier.

Setting up scenes usually takes me until about 4-6pm. The first hour or two of that is getting the characters posed and lit how I want them to be. This can take up a whole day if it's a new asset and I need to redo all the environmental lighting. Could go to 8pm sometimes. I log plenty of twelve hour days let's just put it that way. After I'm finished lighting and posing. I'll then do each of the individual renders with the characters speaking and create facial expressions that match the emotions they are portraying.

I very much view a visual novel as both a book and a play at the same time, if those two could be married. Sometimes I'm accused of keeping characters in the same pose for too long. But, even if that is true on occasion, I try to offer multiple camera angles when I can. Not to mention during a conversation with multiple people they just don't walk around all over the place and do back flips on the couch. I see things overdone far too much like that, and it's just not how I roll.

 The most important part of it to me is, what's the look on their face when they're saying something. I believe this is what separates One Day at a Time from a lot of other games, not all, but a lot. Most devs are visual first. I'm story first because I come from an acting and music background. I look to how the visuals can serve the story and a lot of people do it the other way around. I liken this to a guitar player who doesn't do a bunch of shredding in a solo, but does what's needed to serve the song.

Some have claimed the girls in One Day at a Time aren't the most drop dead gorgeous models you can possibly find, that you've seen reused a hundred times in other games. I'll tell you a little secret. I didn't want them to be.

I wanted my models to be girls you might actually encounter in your neighborhood or see more than the one time a year you pass an absolute knockout walking down the street. It just seemed more ingenuous to do it this way. The models in the game aren't supposed to all look like bombshells. But, in my opinion I'd nail every one of them if I had the chance. To each their own. They are all well above average attractiveness in my opinion. The next game they will all be bombshells, because they're actresses.

Ok that was a bit of a tangent, so let me get back to the process. Once I'm done posing the facial expressions for each render I then transfer them via a mapped drive to my render PC. Which was bought completely with money I made from the game. So know, that what you pledge I'm reinvesting. At that point I make a batch of anywhere from 50 to 125 images I've set up. Really depends on how easy the scene was. MC and Lydia just talking is an easy scene. The one above with 3 camera's and four characters if you include MC in POV, takes much longer.

While the images are rendering overnight at the end of my day I will postwork all the images I did the day before, then they go into the render folder, then the game folder and into the cloud. After that, I try to give myself four hours to chill before I go to bed. Sometimes that doesn't happen and I'll get a head start writing the scene for the next day, or I'll have a light bulb moment for a scene and go outline it or maybe even write it. Which is to say when I'm in active development my mind is pretty much always on the game.

Sometimes I'm done at 4pm (very rarely) and I'll do a promo/custom render to improve my skills. Or I'll work on trying to learn Blender. Which if I'm able to do that I'll be able to bring you more powerful animations in the next game.

I almost forgot and this usually happens when I do postwork. When an animation is done I'll compile it in Photoshop, then use a program called Flowframes to take it out to 60 fps. If I don't like the speed I'll adjust that with the final product in DaVinci Resolve. After which I'll convert the files to .webm via Handbrake, so they can be played in the renpy engine. As you can see the animation process is what takes the most amount of time. But, I've grown to like doing that over time and it's my hope I've gotten better at it. I'm pretty sure I have.

Anyway, if anyone has any questions I'd be happy to answer them in the comments, but I won't spoil anything about that game. Hope this gives you a little bit of insight about how things get done and what my process is.

As always, hope you are all doing well! Cheers!

P.S. - I absolutely love what I do and the honor of being able to realize my vision of One Day at a Time. It is my passion and I couldn't imagine my life without doing this type of content now.