PowerPlower

Status update September

This was not a small month for us. We finalized our first major release! I think we took a huge step from the dev preview and even from the 0.9.0 version.

But we know there is still a lot to do. I think most people will wonder which direction the game takes now. Some parts I can disclose, but will go to detail later when the features are getting implemented and details are more clear.

System - Money

Money will be important in Terror. For both the light and t...

Terror 0.1.0

Link: PC & MAC

Changelog from 0.0.9:

- We added skills. Most skills will start being useful later. But Charisma and intelligence already have some effect!

- Some GUI changes, now you can skip time at the end, to see the different lightning!

- Some editing, grammar fixes, small adjustments

- Scene 25 redone!

- Fixed some issues with the player, renders etc.

Status Update!

Hi everyone, status update in the middle of the month!

From experience that is usually a very bad sign. In this particular case, it isn’t. Quite the opposite.

But let’s take a look at where we stand.

Writing
About 30% of the text is proofread. I think I will manage the rest on the weekend, however the text is generally already in good shape.

Rendering
Almost everything is final. Some single renders we want to exchange still a...

Status update August

We have finished rendering everything. Not every scene is yet perfect and I assume we still have at least a week for doing fixes, some re-rendering because we are not yet happy. Maybe two weeks.

How much is it in size? Over 800 unique, high quality renders in total, 15+ Animation sequences, including both daz and blender animations, as well as over 30k words.

I expect our release to be in about 3 weeks. We still need to work on the GUI and on stats (Sandbox). We already re-worked...

Character Introduction - Mina

Mina is a Serbian girl that wants to live a good life. Her parents were immigrants and relatively poor, but she was given a chance to study and make something out of life.

Money is crucial for her, but she is also lazy. Eventually, to her luck, she realized pretty girls don’t have to work as hard as others. A fact she is being reminded of frequently.

Since she gets everything quite easily, she looks down on poor and dumb people. Something she closely connects. What other reason ...

Messages

Sometimes it's the small things.

One of the things that will occupy our attention quite a bit going into chapter 1, is the gui. It will be a sandbox game. So there are multiple ways to implement things. Starting with the container: laptop, phone, menu etc.

But for Chapter 0, we already had some messages implemented and we believed we can do better. It didn't make it for the first release, but it's something we'll adjust in the coming release.

We are currently testing new ...

The light & the dark & monthly update

Picture is me sketching for a new design logo. On hold, because I don't seem to hit the spot and there are more important matters at hand.

I've mentioned this about a month ago. We will split the Patreon page into two, to give each patron the option to support what he wants to support. 

Originally the idea was to have the dark side as a contrast measure for the light, something to overcome. But so...

Terror_0.01_Alpha

As announced.

The first part of Terror, not yet perfected, there are 2 scenes missing. Some correction and postwork still needs to be done etc. Consider it an Alpha, but hopefully one of the most interesting Alpha's you have played so far. 

The full chapter follows, including all and any correction to the existing part. One thing that I need to make clear. This is the last release for all patreon levels. We will follow the tier description going forward.
The full patron re...

The evolution of animation

View at your own risk. I have tried to exclude the most gruesome products of our development. 

You already know what we can do with animations, given enough time. But that wasn't always the case. We had quite a long road before us when we initially started.

We didn't know right away what software we could use. There are several options, not just blender. One of the biggest issue was that we needed to port our character in whatever external software we would use. Something tha...

Update cycles

I have been asking myself this question for a while. I would love to do monthly updates, but the chapters are definitely bigger than what we, or any dev team, can do in a month.

Now in the first part I have a good point where I can stop in between the chapter. But that might not always be the case. So what do you prefer?

June Update!

We finished Karma completely this month. Including animations and for the first time didn't eventually publicize a release. It is a release just meant for you.

Since then we, as promised, went fully towards terror.

I mentioned that you could expect a release of a few hundred renders in July. It will be later in July, I believe and it will contain about a week in-game play time, to start. Not yet in the sandbox format, that will be added at the end of the chapter.

To finish t...

Karma Final Patron release

I have announced it end of last month and previously. There will be animations!

We added them and quite frankly I can't wait for feedback.
What you see in the header is just one out of four daz animations, there are over 10 Blender animations added as well. I do not want to spoil anything more. I believe it's really worth it to check it our yourselves.

We also added a small scene for Tom, just because we like the guy. 

2022-06-17 16:49:35 +0000 UTC View Post

May Update

We are still doing animations. Problem we had when trying to animate the bigger scenes in Blender, we had too little VRAM (8GB -> 6.5GB). Now we bought a bigger model we could afford. 12gb ->10.5 GB and faster as well, so we are hoping to have put that issue behind us.
Now we can animate the bad paths of Karma in Blender. In total about 15 small Blender animations are planned. We are also improving on sound still and added a small scene for Tom. 

Expect a release in June.&...

Karma 1.0

I wanted to share the "final" version of Karma with you. There is no new content compared to before, but fixes/improvements for this release.

What changed:
- still quite a few text fixes
- We added a gallery
- some renders were fixed/improved
- Path's were fixed. Now to see the worst ending, you have to follow them up in the same game play. You also will see less of Mark & Clara scenes if you didn't follow them up at this play through.

What is still to c...

Karma 1.0 Beta

Some fixes are still needed. In comparison to the alpha:

- sound improved
- we added an ending screen
- ton of minor bug fixes

https://workupload.com/file/zb6CWfP9UGc

Karma Final Alpha

tl;dr: download links
PC: https://workupload.com/file/e6YyB7UrU8D

MAC: https://workupload.com/file/vyaNwcX6vSv

Changelog:
Renamed Hello World to Karma. What has been changed for this release:

- Post work, you've seen the difference!
- We added Sound!
- New writer went over the text and added some small th...

Post work improvement

I mentioned this a few weeks ago. Did we create a post-work pipeline that helps us with practically no extra effort to increase our render quality? Yes we did and we are happy with it!

Added renders to compare. It looks almost a little bit like we unlocked 4k with 10bit!
So that you will also be able to enjoy and see the difference we'll re-release Hello World as Karma over the weekend. 

More information tomorrow or Saturday!

Map

We might still change the evening map, I like it the least and there is room for improvement.

Some in between renders, a google earth reference (Can't use that because of "terms of use").
The issue with free satellite texture's you should also be able to see, hence the reason we tweaked that texture and also added a lot of objects.
Some Images in between, including one with giant tree's.

Not sure if we should have kept comically large objects like the tree's, I somehow ...

Terror Map

That was a lot of work...

This map has been done entirely in Blender, through various means.
Initially we wanted to animate it, but quite frankly it took too much time already.
We will publish this later on Twitter as well.

Naturally there is a day-version too, that preview will be done patron only. 

There will be some more posts today!

Discord

I've done some work on discord. The commands "/exchange gold/dark" and "/date" should be completely hidden now.

I have however disabled the possibility for temporary chats, as they needed to open up a voice chat. 

I've given every patron I could find some currency to test those two commands out. use first /exchange type=gold and then /date. We've got a bit more than 15 renders, mostly about development stuff. Would love to hear what you think of the mechanics of the feature a...

End of March update!

We reached our first goal - 10 patrons!

Originally I wanted to send you some coins on discord. That feature is not widely used yet, so instead we've made you a render and added some post work to it (learning still in progress). 

So I am sure you are curious how it's going. 

First, as you can see, we are extending our development pipeline to implement some additional post work stuff. This at the moment is a bit try and error. We don't want to change too much, as we ...

Late

Hey Guys,

Short update, as I should have given the monthly update last week and didn't manage.

Currently a lot on the plate and my mind, privately, on the job, as well as with the war in Ukraine.
We have Dev's that are not directly involved (yet) but are close to that region.
If anything should change in this regard and we will slow down significantly, I will let you know.

For now no one is directly involved and I hope it stays that way. We are still devel...

Melissa renders

Two renders I like a lot, thought I'd share them with you.

Hands too big?

I really like the render "Wolverine", some dev's think the hands are too big in this particular viewpoint. It's a bit of a guys vs girls situation here.

What do you think?

Depending on the results the render will be in the game or not!

Progress update

Though month, to be honest. Currently working about 45 hours a week on my main job, plus doing an additional higher certification. That one should be done in a month.

In the evening I come to the project and fix things with our dev's and make sure everything goes smoothly. Or write somewhere something, to get a bit more attention to the project. The more patrons we get, the easier it get's and the faster we can produce high quality content.

Writing

Bad news ...

Mina

There will be another end of month update post. 

For now I just wanted to show you Mina, our second generation immigrant from eastern europe.

Discord

Remember when I told you I will let someone else do the discord bots?

Yeah, I did that. Twice. It did not work out.

Initial agreed date for everything to finish on his side was the end of last year, then 9.1.
On the 14.1 I got the broken, unfinished code. About 30% of the planned functions worked.

I had two choices, either to hire someone else again and pray that he could work with three custom bots and several thousand lines of code. Or I'll see if I still know how to c...

2022

Assuming you read the first part, you can probably guess what the main topic's in the near future are.

Animation

I can't and won't promise anything in this regard. The only thing that I do promise, is that it's an extremely important topic for me. I want us to do well there and I will do what I can, for us to get where we need to and more. But I rather have a good story, beautiful renders without animations, than animations that rip you out of the immersion....

2021 look back

This was a very interesting year for us, we finally had our first release. 

But where exactly were we a year ago?
It was always important to me, that I am not the only one that is capable of something. I've seen creators like Icstor, who had a burnouts. Many projects were closed down because the creator either didn't get success fast enough, or wasn't able to continue.
I want to do better than that, because I am not the only person concerned with this project, so is every one...

Christmas Special release!

It is ready! 

We really hope it makes your Christmas a bit sweeter. As it's a Christmas Special, we soon share it with everyone. For now though, only for you!

https://workupload.com/file/av6U6F7nwN2

Also two Bonus Pictures added.

Merry Christmas!