This week we have a different kind of status update.
After a long internal discussion, we have decided to pause the pledges on the NFG Patreon. The reasons range from personal to preventative, but the main reason is that we believe this is the best decision for Summer Heat in the long run. Pausing pledges will allow us to finish the update without external pressure or distractions.
This week we did dialogue changes, graphical edits and general improvements, including drawing missing pictures and replacing some of the more primitive squigglies and line art made by our kindergarten-tier artist.
We had some minor but annoying problems with fire-related renders that didn't want to cooperate with rendering in the past. We ended up spot-rendering them as an easy fix. Playing through the scene again, we felt the urge to rework them using what we've l...
This week we made many changes to improve visual flow and how you interact with some of the scenes.
For example, we decided to remove a minigame. It felt a bit out of place and we replaced it with something more akin to a quick time event that fits much better. We haven't had these before in Summer Heat, and we're introducing them smoothly without breaking the immersion. It feels natural and you'll have immediate consequences and different reactions in these moments...
This week the playtesting and editing has continued, and we're quite happy with the changes we've implemented lately. There's a scene with Bree where we want to make a punch land just right, and we've tried several different ways to do it already. Switching renders around, choices, QTE, keeping it linear... It's a tough call. We ended up changing things up slightly when it comes to the other characters, so the choice feels better and more impactful.
2026-01-10 19:00:09 +0000 UTCView Post
Hope you had a nice holiday and survived through the New Year!
The holidays are almost over here in Finland, and soon it'll be peaceful again. The coding department got some R&R and is now ready to tackle the pains of SFX and Android again.
On the rendering/art side, we've been cooking. We finished many placeholders and new renders that we wanted to create, and added some more cinematic angles for scene transitions. Pretty simple stuff, and now they feel l...
This week we revisited Eve's scene to see what more we could add to it before calling it done.
We ended up adding an additional option with a small path like in 0.5 to better match her energy. Earlier in the production stage we thought about making a few key animations as well, but we think the renders will work perfectly as is. We will however be trying the toaster "pseudomation" style in this scene to see if we can give it that extra punch, or...
Animations are one of those things we try to improve on with each cycle because they're so requested. Back in the day when we had no animations, we kept hearing that we need them, and lots of them! We didn't really have any scenes to put them in then, but now we do. In fact, we're starting to reach the kind of content where we can make a whole bunch of them, especially for the main girls.
This week we've continued with polishing. Literal polishing too, since we added some much-needed glints, or reflections, to certain renders. Unfortunately such magic isn't always easy to do in the raw renders without excessive blooming, but luckily Photoshop comes in clutch so we don't have to fight with Daz3D to make it do what we want. Just fix it in post.
We have also been playtesting and eliminating pokethroughs, shitty dialogue and a couple of branching bugs. I...
This week we've continued filling in the gaps with missing content and placeholders. Mostly things like drawings and alt angle renders for the perspective button that sometimes shows up in the top right. We've also been editing a lewd scene for better consistency and flow. There were also some all around fixes, post-processing of renders and making a new Android test version.
Next week we'll be editing a hotdog scene and implementing some of the planned changes for ...
Hope you've had a good week, or if not, hope that your weekend is going better.
We've had an interesting week! Surgeries and lots of driving. While sourcing parts for our animation rig, we came across an opportunity to grab ourselves a new-ish 4090 in near perfect condition. And it wasn't a tortured mining or gaming card either! Big win. Instead of sitting in some student's gaming PC, it will get to calculate and render pixels for us, and you.
The post-production work continues. We've continued editing one of the biggest scenes in the game. We were pretty nervous writing the script and screenplay, and making the renders was as tense. Editing tends to be much more chill. But there's always that voice in the back of your head whispering shit you don't need to hear, which can lead to a perfectionist slump. Fix this, change that, etc. Anyway, it's shaping up to be something we can feel proud of.
This week we don't have that many interesting topics or notes to talk about. We made a new batch of renders, post-processed another, fiddled with animation frames, did many lines of SFX and a lot of other coding related tasks. The usual.
We've been trying to sync the SFX better in the outdoor scenes. There's a scene in particular with some football, and it's been a challenge to time the kick sfx in a way that sounds natural. But it's getting there. We tried music...
Alongside nerding out with code this week, we also made some small graphic improvements. Normally, these improvements aren't much to show or talk about since they're mainly technical, but this week there are some renders for worldbuilding purposes. These will replace the shitty thumbnails we had.
Supposedly a picture speaks a thousand words, so here's a short story:
This week we... well, we did pretty much the same as last week. Editing, dialogue proof-reading, and post-processing renders. New renders were also made for the last scene, and some supplementary renders for other scenes.
There is a semi big branch right at the end of the update and we're thinking about the best way to put it together. We think a lot of people will be met with greyed out options again, while others will finally get to act on...
This week we continued with polishing, editing and clicking pixels.
We ended up dismantling a branching scene with several paths. It felt fun in the scripting phase, but it's a branch that limits playthroughs unnecessarily with needless options. In some ways sure these are great since they offer replayability, but sometimes players might not even realize other paths or content even exists. Or they just play once. So, we decided to make it more straightforward wit...
This week we've continued working with animations, editing, ambience and SFX.
A lewd scene with animations is proving to be slightly painful when it comes to rendering and Iray convergence. And for those who aren't Daz nerds like Npx, Iray convergence is responsible for render quality and noise reduction. More light good, less light bad. Each render will calculate slightly differently, which is forgivable when it comes to singular renders, but with animations it wil...
A couple of weeks ago we started using the fade-in progression from the last stretch of 0.5 in the header. It's pretty vague, but it works. The progression % was always quite flawed on our end, and the next time we use numbers it'll be a total render count with a goal. This should be very easy to follow at least. But we'll see! We'll also talk about this more in the post-0.7 news.
On the development side of things, we've continued with editing, polishing, coding ...
This week our main focus has been on editing, polishing and some playtesting. We ended up changing a scene in the evening to be a bit more interactive. It's a little bit like the scene in 0.5 with Bree, or at least has a similar type of interaction. The choice boxes are a pretty default way of handling decisions, which is usually great, but stepping outside of that feels a lot more fun sometimes. Sparingly of course.
This week we worked on a custom development tool, BIOS updates, taming Daz, and making the final RAM upgrades for the foreseeable future. The random system freezes caused by Daz should now be over, and we're not looking to up the rendering quality or complexity any further either. We might even go backwards a little bit in some areas, but we'll see. We're saving all the testing for after the update.
We also fixed some clothing issues with the animations and tried to...
This week we've been creating renders for Kate, toying with animation frames, and discovering how to pop a fuse by using too much electricity. Coincidentally, we also solved a black screen issue we had a while back, which most likely resulted from voltage drops. Finnish room design caught lacking.
In hindsight, a big duh... We'll have to do some more planning and find another place for the next rig, unless we daisy chain some extension cords for ...
This week has been editing focused, with many render fixes and lighting changes as well. Necessary optimizations were made for rendering speeds. This one always feels like a proper chore with many scenes being opened, edited and saved. Not as bad as moving a wall by a few units in hundreds of renders in 0.5 though. That was dreary. 0.6 also had messed up outside environments, which weren't very fun to troubleshoot.
A couple of surviving typos from the 0.5 content we...
Last week we talked about the character bios, and we had no idea the amount of messages and comments we'd get about them! We thought we should answer some of the questions publicly as well.
Some of the bio information will be hidden unless you've played that content or discovered it in-game yourself. Things like the girls' last names, their likes and dislikes, favorite positions, kinks and what they might be good at. And yes, if they are virgins.
This week we've been working on the bio info for the main ladies, among other things. It's basically their profile for the game, in the game. These profiles will include all the typical kinds of information you'd expect like eye color, traits, booty size, cup size, height, weight and so on. And if you have any ideas for other things you'd like to see included, do suggest!
Some of the new UI feels a little bit wonky right now, mainly on the Freeplay laptop. We'll...
A lit...
