Dev Progress Report! With Charts!

Hey guys! (Half Maddie, half writer here)

Here's the detailed report on the Ongoing Development Effort!

There's a lot(!) of text, but I made some charts that work superbly as a TL;DR. Check them out below!

For the readers still with me, a short summary to catch you up:

Our main project is and has always been the game that tells the story of our 4 main characters as they journey through their first year on the  university! 

We have been working on this concept for about 14 years so far. World building, character building, gameplay concepts... The whole shebang!

When it was started, the necessary effort to achieve "critical mass" and secure a large enough audience, and therefore funding, was grossly underestimated. Hence, the tiniest tiny game "A Day With Paige" was published on NG.

Time passed, we struggled on but with little additional success, but eventually decided to go all in on that idea! Real smarts, I tell ya~~

The strategy now is to develop the Two Powerhouses needed to launch the game to the stars, the Final Destination Engine (FDE) and Project VN64!

Those two would allow a small team of nothing-left-to-lose people composed of ourselves to create the game at the quality it deserves!

So, check out this chart about the main game's development!

A little more info about the breakdown above

FDE and VN64: Check their respective charts below!

Graphics: This considers not only character art, but environment art, graphical effects, UI and animations. Also, development of Character art, and parts of the environment art, are gated by the FDE, since using it to make art is so much better and faster than "by hand". This should only advance after the FDE reaches a production milestone, unless something goes really wrong, or we get a really passionate professional artist on the team!

Gameplay: Mini-games have always been a crutch, but we don't need to use them. We figured out a way to consolidate all the mini-games we planned into a "big game", that allows for really cool things like progression, boss-fights and player expression! Designing it is well on its way already and we even have done some testing with paper protoypes ( to be showcased! )

Story: Well, 14 years, right? Most of it was done on World and Character building. We really, really, really want to put it on display, but without the support of good graphics and gameplay, it's not really gonna make a big splash. It doesn't need to be *A*M*A*Z*I*N*G* graphics, but static portraits on an endless VN don't work unless you get extremely lucky, right?

Sound: Huh... Yeah... Nobody here is a musician, or particularly good with audio. We've been winging this hard ever since the beginning. It's the kind of stuff that will only advance after a sizeable crowd-fund of some sort. Or if a passionate musician joins the team!

Now, for the FDE! I sorta explained what it's all about in a very, huh, literary way in Chapters #1 and #2. To give it a proper explanation, the FDE is a piece of software that would allow us to create 2D illustrations by describing them as mathematical entities, instead of picking up a digital brush to paint some pixels on a digital canvas(here's a video demonstrating how a very similar approach works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8--5LwHRhjk)

Why? Because we're not very good artists ^^"  We can sometimes draw pretty things, but it takes us 10000x the time a professional would take. On the other hand, "engineering" an illustration is something that comes naturally to us. Thinking about it in terms of angles, layers, materials...

The same way 3D sculptors often do it.

So why not 3D? We don't know a lot about production-level 3D, only in the academic level. This makes it very hard for us to keep a good pace while making 3D graphics, and they tend to suck most of the time. We also much prefer 2D for character intensive stories. 3D is also much more expensive in terms of time and equipment, unless you use that pre-modeled stuff that floods the lewd games scene. Not really what we're going for here.

But why do it with math of all things? Computer graphics, even pixels, have already a lot of math built within them anyway. We're just using more of it, in less trivialized ways. A big advantage of a math-based engine is that it's much more flexible in allowing the player to change the characters' appearances. Computers are bad at brushes and strokes, but they are really good with numbers. 

If the art can be computed instead of drawn (art in its entirety, not just the image), then through game mechanics, the player can really make a change into the world in a way that feels like casting magic spells.

All right, now to the FDE's chart!

Pretty standard stuff here, but here's some more details about the breakdown.

Research: The answers to questions like "How can we use mathematical functions to model eyes? Angry eyes? Flowing hair? Body parts? All in 2D and looking good?"

Modeling: This is filling the engine with eye models, hair models, body models, animation models, etc. Basically, the brunt of the work. But at the same time, it requires an impressive amount of finesse to not only model eyelashes, but to model pretty eyelashes! Pretty eyelashes seen from every angle! Pretty eyelashes when the eyes close, and narrow, and widen...! (Eyelashes are becoming a trigger around here, no joke)

Programming: This is turning the research concepts into actual software. This is often 10x more work than what's estimated. All the times, every time. But it's one of our strong points. Not the estimation part.

Now, for Project VN64! 

It's a Dialog Navigation Engine! An engine that automatically manages the game state (what's happening in a game at any given time) based on dialog choices, and that doubles down as an engine that can use changes to the game state to manage the character's dialog! And dialog is the best form of narrative, hands down!

The research on this predates our effort in game dev, but we always thought that we would never have a chance to try building this. But alas, it's now or never! We're about 50%~ sure that it's gonna work as intended, and about 95%~ sure that it's gonna work just enough to make other types of narratives in game obsolete on the spot!

Unfortunately, a text only game has no chance of ever gaining some real traction, right? Even a really good one? I wish that wasn't the case. But maybe, if everything else fails, we might try it as a sort of "final fantasy hail mary". Let's hope not, though!

Anyways, the VN64 Chart! 

VN64 is also a research project, so there's nothing really we can add about its development without first getting deep into theories and technicalities. As with most inventions, the invention itself will always speak louder and clearer than its blueprints and documents.

That's about it for the MAIN STUFF we're doing!

"So, what about Bonie's animation?"
"And the teasers on the schedule? "
"And that weird new game you're going on about these last couple of days?"

Bonie's still being worked on, but we really want to use the FDE for the characters' faces. This doesn't require the FDE to be production-ready (since it's going to be used just for the faces, and those will be pre-rendered), but the engine's still not there yet. It feels so close, yet... All the facial animations we tried rendering with it look so... off...

The thing with Research projects is that on a good day you can advance so fast that you feel like you'll get it done that week. On a bad day, you stumble onto a problem that discards all the work done on the previous month. Research projects only so rarely have a steady progress.

Sigh... Anyway...

The very first teaser on the schedule is the "I'm Available" teaser. It's a short teaser. No big deal. It fully requires the FDE though. No two-ways about it.

Well, that's a lie. There's a second way, but it feels so much like a cop out that we're forgetting it exists. For now.

AND, at last, there's the mysterious gamejam-like game I'm spearheading. The one with the sprites! It's a short project to keep this place alive while the hermits slave away at their own delusions in hope of striking promised gold. The rules for it are:

- Daily development! Every day something new, or bust!

- Small and ready to go! I want this done as fast as I can!

- Wonderful chance to showcase the characters in a light-hearted, comedy-first parody! With lewds!

- Leverages my personal experience with game dev in a genre I've been immersed with for 10+ years!

- I get to know what I'm doing! Yay~~!

Oof, that was lot of text. Thank you so much for getting here!

If you have any questions, hop on the comments or join the Discord! Would love to talk to ya!

See you soon~~~!