CaramelCowboy

Weekly Update #12

Hey everyone, 

It feels good to be back to the regular weekly updates. Honestly missed doing this. Here's a random render from the next episode. Everything is good with the laptop.

The Steam release was a huge success for me and I'm pretty sure I can invest in a GOOD pc soon. I'm still not sure about Steams exact cuts and taxes but I'm pretty confident I'll get enough to invest in a PC. This will help me work at a much faster pace because render times will be cut down by a lo...

Back in business! (Almost)

Hey everyone,

I thought it would take longer but I got a call saying I could come get the laptop. Got it yesterday and ran it all night and all of today. Everything seems fine. I got a random game to make sure it was running fine even on high gpu performance and it's looking good.

SO, I'm going to start downloading and installing my programs and assets needed for the game and continue where I left off. There are a lot of assets sadly (~600gb) so it may take a while. But I'm priori...

Pausing payments for a month

Hey everyone, 

Unfortunately, something is really wrong with the damn laptop. Even with a new motherboard, it crashed. Sent it back to them and they wiped the ssd, still crashed after a while. 

Just like my early months when I paused payments before, It just doesn’t feel right to take your money when I’m not sure when I can work on the game next. They said it’ll take 5-6 days, but they’ve said this before. so I don’t want you guys to get charged and then in 5-6...

Issues this week

Hey everyone! i think I missed a weekly update and sorry  if any of you have messaged me on discord. My laptop suddenly went blank while I was working and it just turns off when I reach the desktop (post windows login) . I’m not sure what the issue is and my heart sank as soon as that happened. It’s been 4 days now. it’s still under warranty so I sent it to the service center which is luckily not far from where I live. They said it’ll take 3 days to figure out what’s wrong and ...

Weekly Update #11

Hey everyone! 

Hope you all had a good weekend. I had some issues with my laptop this week and everything really slowed down but it looks like it was a space problem and things seem fine now. Script wise, things are looking great. I'm way ahead of the schedule I set for myself. Now for the renders to catch up. Once I'm done rendering the stuff for the current script, I'll move on to the next part. 

I feel like the release will be ready sooner than usual but I don't want ...

Weekly Update #10

After telling myself I won't add more animations to a particular scene, I went back and added some more anyway (I'm weak). But I'm done with that scene now so it won't haunt my dreams anymore begging for more animations. 

I've written down dialogue for about 10 scenes now which is really nice. 3 out of those 10 NEED animations in my opinion, and the others don't require any but I'd like to try adding some just for fun. I want this update to feel like the end of a chapter so I'm goi...

We made it to Steam!

Hey everyone, Steam has approved the game and it's now showing on the store. The launch should be around the same time the next episode is out. For those of you who can, please consider clicking on the 'wishlist' button here : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1998050/The_Swordbearer__Season_1/

It'll really help with the launch.

Thank you all!

-CC

Weekly Update #9

This week has been a lot of fun because I'm really enjoying creating animations. The only downside however, is that I think I may be overdoing it with the animations at this point (some would disagree). I've decided to stick 3 animations in a scene if I need to and then move on. I can then come back to animations when I'm almost done with the episode. This way I'm not halting my progress by focusing on heavily animating only 1-2 scenes. 

I'm also considering posting a release on st...

Random Update!

Just felt like sharing a character whose name has come up in conversation but she was never really shown (Not a LI).

Been working on animations lately since the last update had just the one. I have a good feeling about animations this time so we should have a decent amount in the next release. 

For those interested, render count is at 98 images and 3 animations so far. Progress wise, I think it's great compared to previous 'post-release' periods. I'm really liking the flow of...

Weekly Update #8

After the overwhelming support from the latest release, I realize that I don't feel like taking a break from working on this project. Waking up to patron numbers going up is something I'm very grateful for. So thank you to all of you who have joined, stayed, or even supported in your own way like sharing the game.

What I did last time was render a chunk  of scenes, code a chunk, and repeat. This time however, I'm going to write a scene, render a scene, code a scene. This way is tur...

Patron appreciation post! (and survey)

I hit my first goal of 100$ per month, around a week ago. While all of you have been a HUGE reason for my motivation to go ahead with this project, I have to take some time to thank a few people who have been more than generous with the amount of money they've put in. 

A huge shoutout to Ralltiir for being my first high tiered patron. He's been around from the first release and the amount of faith he put in this project is just amazing.

Rebelyon, the guy who took my goal from...

v0.2b!

Phew! As usual, I ran into some small 'I want to change this' issues at the end. I know I'm a few days late so I apologize. 

v0.2b was fun for me to work on because I got to finally start bringing more of the plot in the story. Granted, it's not a main part of the story yet, but it's much more present than the previous versions. Currently 4 am where I am so I'm sorry if I don't make sense or this post ends up being filled with typos.

If you find any bugs/grammatical errors, f...

v0.2b release date!

Hi everyone! 

Had an issue with some pathing in the free roam scene which is now fixed. The release should be uploaded within the next two days. So before the 5th. (It's the 3rd where I am so I'm not sure how that translates to your timezone). I want to add one more bonus image and re listen to some music to make sure the choices feel right. Thank you for your patience! The file will be uploaded here and on discord. Hope you like it!

V0.2b soon!

Hey everyone,

There's a bit of a network issue where I am right now so it's taking forever to upload an image. This is just an update to let you know that I'm in the middle of proof-reading and bug fixing. So it shouldn't take much longer. I won't have decent internet until the 2nd-3rd of May but I'll still try to upload the file before that. Maybe it'll work if I leave it overnight or something. Really excited for you guys to play. Sorry this is just a tiny update because I don't want ...

Weekly Update #7

We're almost there!

A little sneak peek into an upcoming scene that I had fun working on. I'm working as fast as I can without sacrificing the 'vision' (pardon my fanciness) I have for this update. So far, I can include everything I wanted this update to have, which is great. 

Render count at 520ish for those interested. I'm expecting ~550. Not important for many but I'm sure some are curious. I can't really comment on total play-time but it should definitely be longer than 0...

Weekly Update #6

This week has been so busy for me that I didn't even realize I forgot about my weekly post. (my bad) For those who celebrate it, Happy Easter!

I'm finally getting close to the end of rendering, which is the most time consuming part of development for me. I ended up wanting to add another scene to the update. What can I say, this is becoming a habit. I think I'm happy with the scenes an update has, and then I suddenly come up with another scene that I really want to include. 

...

Weekly Update #5

Finally working on the free-roam event for this release. This scene has so many little events since there are four characters excluding the mc. I've been playing with some animations lately just to see if I should add them in. Simple idle animations etc. I'll include them as long as I feel like they're not ruining the flow and just wasting the players time. I'm trying to keep this game 'to the point' and a little more. No unnecessary filler text / animations that make no sense.

This rel...

Weekly Update #4

Happy weekend everyone!

Development is going as planned and that makes me happy because I'm really getting used to the flow. I'm grateful to all of you for supporting me even though this is literally the first time I've tried creating something like this. Release date will definitely be on schedule, which will be the end of this month. I'm dedicating more time to proofreading this time because the last release had really silly grammatical errors and I don't want to repeat that.

Fo...

Weekly Update #3

No, this is not a new character. Just a cat I liked.

The update currently has 4 scenes aka 4 separate events with characters. The next scene is going to introduce a new main character with a little plot leak. I find that adding trickles of plot buildup at least once per release is working well for me right now, so that's how I plan on doing it until I feel like it doesn't work. This week was a little slow because world building(creating the scene, adding relevant items to it, getting li...

When she's not obsessing over plants, she likes to read

I feel like I'm kinda biased towards Talitha because she's the first character I made. I already got the end of her path written out so maybe that's why she feels like a 'whole' character to me.

Anyway! random render from v0.2b .

Hope y'all have a good work week.

-CC

Weekly update

Hey everyone! 

Hope you had a great week. Just calling it a night and thought I should post my weekly update as planned. After a lot of internal debating on how I want to open the next release, I made up my mind and wrote the script for it and got the renders ready. We're currently at 60 renders for the intro scene of 0.2b  .

I want this release to be much longer than the previous one so we're probably looking at a lot of renders this time and also more animations. I'll ...

Weekly Update

Hey everyone, I took a few days off after v0.2a to gather my thoughts on how the flow for the next release should be. I think I have it all figured out and I'm happy with the planned end of v0.2b.

Going forward, I may continue with this style of version naming just so I can put in more content before hitting v1.0

All in all it's been a good week progress wise. My workflow is always evolving with each release since I'm learning new stuff all the time and is becoming more efficient ...

v0.2a!

Please read before you download

Hey everyone, I've finally decided to post v0.2a. 

Just a few things before you play. I intended for this release to be bigger but after my unavoidable delay, I figured waiting for the entire planned release would take even longer and I just wanted to get this release out. v0.2b will be bigger than this because I'll be squeezing in content that I planned for 0.2a too.

Thank you all for sticking with me and bein...

v0.2a Release date!

Hey everyone! After a lot of bug testing, making sure the paths don't mess the future episodes up, I'm starting to think everything looks good so far. I'll release the latest version on the 28th of this month. I'll be done before that but I'm going to keep an extra day of testing just in case. 

I'm releasing this as 0.2a because I still have a lot of content I want to include in a 0.2 version. And if I try to squeeze all that in one update, it'll take way too long.

So this ve...

Progress update! 5/02/22 (Public post)

Happy to announce I'm finally on the last few steps of the release. All the renders are done (550~600). Animations are all set up for rendering and they're almost done too. Around 3/7 are left. Once this is done, I playtest the entire chapter a few times and make minor adjustments if the flow doesn't make sense or if something feels too bland to me. After I double check all the variables and make sure the code is solid, I'll announce a release.

-CC

Progress update!

Hi everyone! Happy to announce that I can finally go all out for the next release as I'm done with my holiday.  I'll also be more active on discord and respond sooner. I hope all of you are safe and healthy and not coughing your asses off like most people I know.

Stay healthy and thank you for sticking around! It really means a lot and it's what gets me so excited to work on this. Updates will be much faster this time around since I'm done with my annual holiday. So it's...

Merry Christmas!

Hey everyone, 

I'm committed to this project for the long run and it makes me happy to have you as my early supporters. 

This isn't much but as a token of my appreciation, I'm going to pause payments once again. This means you wont be charged at the beginning of next month.

Think of this as a Merry Christmas from me to you and also a way of showing you how grateful I am for the support I've gotten after just one release.

-CC

...

Update progress

Hope everyone's having a good day! I'm pretty happy with the progress I made after the little break. With my first release, renders took the most time since I was still getting used to the process. This time, I decided to tackle renders first so I got maybe 70% out of the way. I'm going to start coding the dialogue and navigation system etc for those renders. Excited to share the next release as soon as possible but once I'm done, I'd like to spend a few days testing it because I want minimal...

Back to work!

Hey guys! Just wanted all of you to know I'm back to rendering and will start posting updates again! Hope you're all doing well.

-CC

Important announcement for supporters

Hi everyone, hope you're all having a great week. Just wanted to let you guys know that you won't be charged on 1st November since I paused billing for the month. 

I probably wont be able to work on stuff for 2 weeks since I'll be on a little vacation and I don't want you guys/girls to lose money. 

I'll of course always be thinking about stuff to add and also work on the code part of it but I won't be able to commit too much time for the renders while I'...