Our Future Plans for SeptCloud

Hey everyone!

Early in the development of The Seven Realms, we shared a post detailing the scope of the project. Moving into the new year, we wanted to share where we're at and some of our future plans with you.

The Seven Realms

Our ultimate plan for The Seven Realms remains largely unchanged from when we launched it. We've always planned to continually improve it and for it to be a massive game upon completion. We're now well underway with the development of Realm 3, and after the changes to our workflow in recent months (including the remaster of Realm 2), we now plan to get back into a more consistent release schedule. We'll finally be offering character side paths in Realm 3. This will be another ambitious undertaking for us, but we're excited to share this with you all. It will allow all players to spend time in each realm with their favourite characters, even if they don't appear frequently in the main plot of that realm.

Our Team

Animations

We currently have one animator, Autmn3, working on our animations. Shoe_Lac3 then lights these, places the cameras, and adds other effects as needed. Autmn3 is currently training a second animator, who we hope will be able to join the team fully in a few months. The speed at which Autmn is completing the animations is incredible; he's very efficient at creating these quickly. Our goal in hiring another animator is to allow everyone more time per animation to really level them up without the risk of slowing down. We want both NSFW animations and SFW cinematics present throughout the game, with the hope that this will enhance your playing experience.

Still Images

Regarding the game's still images, we would love to find someone to help with posing them. Currently, we've not found someone who we feel can match Tae's speed and style at a cost that's feasible for us. Even if they were unable to pose as fast as Tae, having the render speed up to x1.5 would allow Tae more time to plan things in advance. Even if the speed doesn't increase, having others helping her would give her more time to compose each render. This would be great to allow more detail in each scene. Hiring two people would be ideal, but we're still trying to find the right fit.

Development/Release Schedule

Regardless of whether or not we hire more animators or posers, this currently won't speed up the release schedule for The Seven Realms. The reason for this is that we only have one person who's lighting the still images and animations. We stopped searching for someone to help Shoe_Lac3 a while ago while we focused on getting the Realm 3 releases back on track. Currently, the posing of images and animations is a few updates in advance. However, the lighting and camera work are essential elements in the quality of our releases, and we won't compromise on that to release faster. Shoe_Lac3 is fast, but he is only one person, and we don't want to work him to death (more than we already do). Our eventual goal is to have someone who can assist Shoe_Lac3; however, it will be incredibly difficult to find someone who can match his level. If we can eventually find this, we will be able to increase our speed back to a release schedule like in Realm 1, where we released two updates per month. This isn't likely anytime soon, but we did love releasing so frequently during Realm 1.

In-Game Environments

We've mentioned in previous development posts that moving forward, rather than using default environments available in the Daz store; we will be creating custom environments to ensure the game feels unique and fits the vision Tae has for the locations. Some of these are already featured in our first Realm 3 release. The creation of environments for the rest of Realm 3 is going smoothly. We've created numerous High Lathión environments (including a city with a low-res preview below) and a few new ones for Pythonium and Terran.

Future Projects

Tae's always had a creative mind. She comes up with various stories set in The Seven Realms universe (and other ones) and has to write down everything on notes, or she'll forget about them. During downtime, she would expand on these, but we have less and less free time, so it was hard for her to keep writing stories simultaneously, all the more because TSR was taking up more and more of her thoughts.

So, what we decided to do, is to have other people use her notes and early writing to create the scripts for these stories. Thanks to that, she can still focus on TSR and not lose all her ideas due to lack of time. During times when she can’t pose (because all our computers are rendering), she goes over the scripts and changes things if they need to be changed or have more added. Sometimes, she changes the dialogue or characters significantly. She does this to be sure that each of our games has the same feel and quality.

It's been working well, and 80k words have been written and edited into a script for another game. We've handed over notes for a couple of other future planned projects too. These other projects are in very early stages and will not impact our work on The Seven Realms. However, we are very excited to share them with you once development of them ramps up.

Nobody other than Tae is writing TSR as it's her baby, and she will have a mental breakdown if someone writes something she doesn’t like about it.

Our ultimate goal with SeptCloud is to create an indie dev studio that creates high-quality games. We hope that in 2024, we move a few steps closer to making that dream a reality.

Thanks so much for all of your continued support. Without you, none of this would be possible. We're so grateful to have you here, and we hope you continue to enjoy the games we produce!

Have a good one!

Jay