Stolen Rose

Dev Log 09-Jun-2024

Hello!

This is the first dev log for Day 5. I haven't actually done much, but I do have a general outline with major events and the structure I'd like to have for the next release.

Apart from that, what I really wanna do is to practice animation and making better stuff on that front. I've already started working on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ollOMMZB2ZY My most recent animation (may or may not be used in the next release--we'll see).

Anyway, just wanted to say that I'll be starting work on the next release next week. Probably just planning the story though.

Hope you're having a wonderful day!

--SR

Day 4 (v0.2.4d) General Access Patch Only

It took a while, but it's finally here. It's different than what we've been doing until now. You'll see. I hope you like it!

If you're wondering why the filesize is more or less the same as Chapter 1, I switched to .avif files for this release and it massively reduced the image size.

Let me know if anything isn't working as it should!

--SR

Mac:

Pixeldrain -- Mega

Windows/Linux:

Pixeldrain -- Mega

Release

And a song to go with Swansong here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd-ne3NCcLk

Dev Log 24-May-2024

Hello!

This will be my last update until the release. This one is the largest while also taking the longest. I apologize for that. Several of the months I've been working on this release were plagued with me feeling absolutely horrible, plus there was some time spent jumping through hoops for the Steam version. Still, I'm happy to announce that all the content for this release has been completed.

This release is the largest yet, but that wasn't what I intended. I wanted to have a smaller release this time, but the story required a lot more scenes than I expected. That being said, I think you'll like what the story is bringing. There will be no stat checks and no puzzles this release--it's a straight-up visual novel. There are some deity interactions, but they are very optional. Checks and puzzles wouldn't have worked for this release, so I decided not to include them. It's difficult, as a game designer, to exclude game mechanics, but as a narrative designer, I couldn't force mechanics that made no sense to the story.

All that being said, the release is on the 29th for early access and on the 1st of June for general access.

Now, I need to mess around with the tiers and whatever, but the idea is that the full build will be entering the $10 category. The $5 tier will have just the files for chapter 2. Speaking of, final roundup:

Wordcount: 32k+ for this release, 102k+ total

Image Count: 2200+ for this release, 6100+ total

Animation Count: 20 animations this release, 48 total

Animation in seconds: around 80 seconds this release

Overall, this release is about as large as the first two combined.

I'll have a cool picture with the release dates soon.

All the best,

SR.

Dev Log 12-May-2024

Hello!

It's been... a lot. You know that feeling when you run in a dream, but it doesn't really work? Yeah, that's how I feel about renders. I've been averaging around 40 each day for a few weeks now and there's still about 3 scenes left to do. Anyway, we're already over the 2k renders mark and there's still about 200 left to do (I think). It's getting close, though. I wanna finish up the stills next week and use the week after to render animations while I do the post-processing and set up music/sound effects + stats and flags.

Hopefully, it'll be out in two weeks. This crunch is getting a bit much. But, then, I really want it to be great and I think all the effort will be worth it. I hope the wait will be worth it too and you enjoy the new release. I'll be back with release details once the stills are done and I can estimate the remaining work that's needed.

Hope you're having a wonderful day!

--SR

Dev Log 28-Apr-2024

Hello!

I skipped the last update because I wanted to finish up the story, so good news--it's done. We've clocked in at 32-33k words. That's like 6k more than the previous release, which wasn't my intention. I wanted to keep it shorter, but a lot of scenes needed to go in and I'd rather not detract from the quality of the release just to keep it shorter. Another reason I wanted to wait until the writing is done is because now I can give a better estimation on how much is left to be done.

Around 1650 still renders are finished and those cover about 75-80% of the story, so I estimate we'll be around 2k renders for this release. At the rate I'm going, that's about 2 weeks of work. In addition, there's about 5-6 animations left to do, every render needs post-processing, and flags + stat increases need to be added. Some of those can be done at the same time. I think in 3 weeks, it'll be ready, but I'm not 100% sure on that. When I get close to the finish, I'll post an official announcement.

Hope you're having a wonderful day!

--SR

Content preview #54

Don't usually share previews of him, but I've been clowning on him a lot this release, so I figured I'd give him his moment.

Dev Log 16-Apr-2024

I'm going to do a super quick update just to keep you all in the loop, but I'll have more near the end of the week.

As you've noticed, the deity images were completed and implemented.

The story is a few scenes short of being done.

Spent a lot of time on animations and got about 6 of them done plus a hundred or so renders.

I'll have a final content preview now and stop until the release as it's veering deep into spoilers after this.

This week I wanna get as many static renders done as possible and finish the story.

Hope you're doing amazing!

--SR

Deity Art

Finally, it's done. I'm really happy with how they turned out.

Check out ancasarba on Instagram. She's an amazing artist <3

Content preview #53

Odette is always a blast

Dev log 07-Apr-2024

Hello!

It's been another great week. The rush that I got last week kept going, so we're a few hundred words away from the 30k words mark. I still need about 2k more to wrap up the story for day 4, but the writing is in its final stages. I've been doing a lot of rendering as well this week, so we're around 1300 renders right now. I still have a few animations in the queue which will be finished by tomorrow, I expect.

Next week, I wanna finish writing and set up a bunch of static renders and animations. I'm almost done with a pretty large scene and I hope to finish with it and move on to the next one.

Honestly, the tl;dr of this update is that everything's going really well. I hope to be done with everything by the end of the month.

Hope you're doing wonderful.

--SR

Swansong

You know, I realized she reminds me of an ex girlfriend, just with all the mental illness sliders set to max value.

Content preview #52

She's not thaaaat bad, right?

Dev Log 31-Mar-2024

Hello!

So I'm just coming down the high of a writing binge. I intended to use this weekend to write and that's exactly what I did. A lot. We're over 25k words right now, meaning we're somewhere between the second and third days in terms of wordcount. Now, that's great news, but it is somehwat soured by exactly what I was expecting would happen--the story is only about 70-80% done. I really tried to shorten it as much as I could, but I don't want to deliver anything that feels rushed. Especially not near the end. It's shaping up to be a really cool start to the new chapter and I want to do it justice. Apart from that, just a normal amount of renders.

Next, I'll probably need to edit all that text since I wrote it in a frenzy, but after that, I'll get back to rendering. I just figured something out to make images just a little bit cooler and I wanna test it out next week.

Hope you're doing great!

--SR

Content preview #51

Unfortunately, I don't have anything super exciting from what I've been doing recently, but here's Lilith. She's about as fun to write as I was hoping. Maybe more.

Dev Log 24-Mar-2024

Hello!

It's been a pretty good week. My good mood and excitement carries on. I finished rendering the images for all the deity interactions and started on the transition scene. With writing, I wrote a good chunk of what's likely to be the largest scene this release. I also tried to see if I can move to Blender, since it would yield far better quality images and animations, but... well, the answer is yesn't. It would require either a lot more knowledge than I have or a lot of time. I'll keep trying as we go, but for now I'm stuck in Daz, unfortunately. Would probably have been easier if I didn't think of this halfway(ish) through the project.

Next week, I wanna try and finish writing that scene if I can. I should finish rendering the transition scene in a few days, so after that I'll push hard to get to the animations. Those take more time and I wanna do a lot more of them and make them more exciting this time around.

Hope you're having a great day!

--SR

Glass Rose

Seduction isn't her dump stat

Content preview #50

What you want to hear isn't often what you need to hear. But sometimes it is.

Dev Log 17-Mar-2024

Hello!

This may be a bit longer than usual as I want to get into some more personal stuff. I'll start with the updates so whoever isn't interested in the rest can skip.

We're currently close to 20k words and going on 900 static images. I've been trying really hard to get ahead with the writing so it doesn't block progress on the images. Also, I added music and SFX for everything that's currently in the build.

Going forward, I'm going to try and optimize the content output as it's been slower than my usual  pace in the last few months. There's a good reason for that, but it's been resolved. Which is what I want to get into next.

This has a good ending, but we'll have to crawl through dirt to get there. Over the last four months or so, I've felt overwhelmed. I couldn't work at my normal rate, I was stressed, exhausted and felt incredibly burn out. Looking back, I'm surprised I could do even as much as I did. Even though I was determined to keep going, the thought of how much work I still had to do was daunting. I felt doomed and hopeless. That led me down a path of substance-abuse which only made things worse. I won't say it was my lowest, but it was pretty damn close.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon videos about Magnesium and D-vitamin deficiencies. Now, I knew I was probably somewhat deficient in those aspects and was taking some supplements, but I realized that I was taking Magnesium Oxide and the D3 supplement had so little that I would have had to take 50 pills every day to get to a sufficient dose. So I got some high-quality supplements. I didn't expect a miracle, but I figured I would feel better in time.

But I got a miracle, basically. I slept very well, woke up early, didn't feel anxiety anymore, had energy, felt more confident, and I realized I enjoyed life again. It's been about four days and I've been working hard every day. I don't feel like it's too much, I don't feel mentally exhausted, and I'm excited about the project again after so many months.

I thought really hard whether I should post this or not, but I figured it may help someone. Apparently a lot of people are deficient in those things. Now, please note that I'm not a doctor and all this is just my personal experience. Still, if it helps even one person, it's worth sharing. For that reason, this update is public.

I hope you're having a wonderful day. I am.

--SR

Content preview #49

Just 20 more previews until we get to the funny number

Dev Log 04-Mar-2024

Hello!

New Dev Log just dropped.

Sorry for missing an update, there wasn't a lot to update last week, just a bit more progress. Since then, though, I got a breakthrough in the scene with Alice that was killing me. Needed a shift in perspective to realize I was approaching the scene wrong. So I managed to finish that scene and now I'm working my way through some deity interactions. As for visuals, since I was blocked for a while, I'm almost caught up to the writing. Were around 800 images so far, but I expect that'll be accelerated massively this month, so I need to focus on writing as much as I can right now.

Speaking of, I took a few days off work to deal with taxes and other company-related bullshit (because that's something I need to do now), so I'll use the next two days to push as far as I can with the writing. I'll try to keep going with the renders as well, but I'm prioritizing writing. We're done with the hangouts, so next up is going to be focused more on external conflict and things happening™️

Anyway, gotta get back to rendering. Hope you're having a wonderful day!

--SR

Content preview #48

Frame from one of the animations I mentioned in the update. I don't usually share sex images or animation frames, but I figured a few people would be excited to know there's a scene with her coming

Dev Log 19-Feb-2024

Hello!

It's been a weird week. I didn't really manage to get a lot of what I intended to done, but I did other stuff. With writing, I've hit a bit of a writer's block and I'm still trying to figure out what the issue is. It's a scene with Alice and those are always pretty difficult to write, but I think the block may be because I need to understand what she's feeling better. There's something that isn't clicking. While I said I was done with the animations since the next scene doesn't need any, I was feeling doing some more animations, so I made 2 fairly long ones for a future scene. I've also tried some new things with the animations so they feel more engaging. I think they're pretty damn nice. Apart from that, I did still work on the static renders for the scene--it's about halfway done.

This week, I wanna finish the current scene and get over the writer's block. It's not optional, I'm running out of writing to make renders for. Hopefully, I can figure out how to express what Alice is feeling and I just get a "click" moment. Hopefully.

Anyway, hope you're having an amazing day!

--SR

Content preview #47

Selena being Selena

Dev Log 11-Feb-2024

Hello!

Today, especially, has been a really good day at the end of a bunch of terrible ones. I really hope it keeps up. Anyway, update: I've finished all animations and static renders for the scene I was working on and they're looking pretty damn good. As promised from the results of the survey, I've started creating more animations, even for non-erotic scenes (you'll see, I think it's super cool). I think the whole scene looks and feels really nice. For writing, the scene with a lot of branching is done and I started writing one with even more branching. Luckily, this is the place where some of that branching collapses, otherwise this could have gotten way too convoluted. It's still within reason, don't worry, I'm just glad I thought ahead and planned for branches collapsing at some point.

 Oh, also, I commissioned a song from a friend and it sounds really cool, even incomplete as it is. I'll share it once it's done. The deity images are still in progress, but I received a more detailed version of some and they're looking really, really good. I'll share those too, of course, when they're finished.

For my next trick, I'll keep writing and try to finish the current scene. Visuals-wise, there's no animations in the next scene, so I expect it'll go considerably faster (just the animations took me about a week).

Anyway, hope you're having a wonderful day!

--SR

Content preview #46

Some shots are just better than others

Dev log 28-Jan-2024

Hello!

It's been a minute since the last update. Reason for that, as you might imagine, was that I was handling the Steam release. That's come and gone, the results have been slightly above expectations with almost 1500 copies sold as of now. Of course, that's gonna slow down massively in the following weeks, but at least I can get a 4090 after Steam and the government take their cut. Granted, that's only going to happen in March, but it should significantly speed up rendering. That was a pretty significant portion of my time, but I've also worked on some animations and, while one needs to be re-rendered (clipping), they actually look really nice and enhance the scene by a lot. I'm sure you'll feel the same once you get to see it. Apart from that, I've wrapped up the writing on another hangout (this needed a LOT of branching) and I can start on the final one. After that we're moving back to the intrigue.

Next week, I wanna do some more animations as there's 2-3 left to do for the scene and I wanna finish rendering that whole scene if all goes well.

Hope you're having a wonderful day!

--SR

The Nine of Swords

I couldn't focus on writing with all the Steam release stuff, but I wanted to do something cool and I haven't rendered a shot with Brianna in quite a while. Figured it was about time.

I made one with Alice as well, but then I realized it's spoilery, so that one I'll share after the next release.

The Queen of Pentacles

Happy I celebrated, not that happy about the headache, but I did this and I thought it looked really nice.

STEAM!!!1

Can't believe it's out. I'mma party tonight. Gimme a review if you like it. I'm told it helps a bunch.

Here's the link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2573050/Zero_End_Chapter_One/