itroy

Development Update #91

What a month it has been. The highest highs, and the lowest lows. The good news is that we are ending the last 30 days on a high note. For my regular patrons who watch the behind-the-scenes videos, a lot of this will be review. The rest of you, please strap in.

Clothing - What A Mess

Clothing nearly did me in. Days of testing and tweaking kept leading to dead ends and major issues. I was a bit worried we would need to convert TBaK to a nudist game. Thankfully impr...

Have you played The Seven Realms?

The Seven Realms is a fantasy, story-driven adult visual novel created by a couple known as SeptCloudGames.

You play as the vampire prince maintaining order in the Realm of Terran (Earth). You unexpectedly meet a girl called Leyala, which begins a chain of events that will lead them across all seven realms.

In their recent updates, SeptCloud have complete...

Development Update #89

Just an FYI that I'll be cutting the frequency of these development updates back a bit (to every 2-3 weeks). Day-to-day is a regular pattern of trying new things, refining existing content in UE, watching some tutorials, and working hard to get the next release out. If you don't hear from me for a couple of weeks, fear not. As always, I'm pretty active in Discord most evenings and weekends.

With us halfway through June, there is very good progress to report at the five month mark since ...

Development Update #85

The name of the game is now polishing the characters. Still some bigger items on the list, but this is helping me get everything dialed in and finding the errors I've missed.

One big area of focus has been getting hair optimized. By far the biggest performance hit of my scenes in Unreal Engine is the converted groom hair. Just adding that cuts the FPS in half. If this was for a game in real time, I'd definitely be sticking with less realistic card-based hair. The physics simulations the...

Development Update #84

The grind continues, and I'm not going to bore anyone with details of the triumphs and agonies of the last couple of weeks. I am trying something a bit different with development over the next couple of weeks. You can get all the details (and a sorta preview) by watching the video (no longer 18+!), but the gist of it is that I am now going to try and complete a scene (or most of one) in Unreal Engine to work out all the bugs. There's a lot still to get done for characters, but I'm hopeful tha...

Development Update #82

This is a dev update that's been rewritten about 10 times now. That means it should only contain 5-8 typos and roughly 25 grammatical errors! This is why I have a beta team for the game releases, folks.

It isn't proper game development work if you don't have to do it at least twice. I was reminded of this when I discovered that EVERY character model I had exported and converted would need to be redone thanks to a few issues I found. Mercifully we are a bit over halfway through that proc...

Things Are Getting…Unreal

My patrons know this, but I am at the point where I can make it public. I am moving future releases of To Be A King over to Unreal Engine instead of Daz Studio. There are many reasons for the change, with the main one being that animations in Daz are not workable for the vision I have. For your easy perusal, I've included some frequently asked questions below.

Does this mean I need a powerful PC with a nice graphics card to play future releases?

Nope. I'm sparing ...

Project Lambda FAQ

I've gotten a lot of questions since my announcement, so I thought it would be good to put a FAQ here to make things easy for everyone. It's a big switch, and I appreciate everyone wanting to know more. I'll update this, as needed.

Does this mean I need a powerful PC with a nice graphics card to play future releases?

Nope. I'm sparing you from that purchase. I use a game engine called Renpy, and that is used by nearly every visual novel out there. What Project Lam...

Development Update #78 - Big News

Are you sitting down? Good. This is one of the most difficult dev updates I've ever written. It is time to say goodbye…

…to Daz Studio. It's been an adventure for the past 4 years with it, but it no longer fits my needs. The animation setups were the final straw. No need to go into all the reasons for Daz transitioning from my main software to a very small piece of it, but this brings me to...

Development Update #77

Time for a progress report. A lot going on behind the scenes. The development progress tracker on Trello has some nice updates to it. I'm now at one of the longer parts for development this cycle, apart from actually setting up the renders - animation testing.

My thanks to all the lovely developers, and my beta team, for providing feedback and recommendations as I work through getting the hang of ...

A Request

Hey everyone! If you've purchased the game on Steam and played it there, I would appreciate you leaving a review on the Steam store page, if you have some time. Thank you all so much for your support here and on Steam.

I'll have a regular development update in the next few days with some exciting progress. Have a great rest of your weekend!

Release Length Poll

Alright, patrons. Got a question for all of you here. Wondering how long it took you to play through the last release. For the poll purposes, this is just assuming you played from the start of Chapter 10 to the end of it. If you started over from the beginning, I don't need that length. No real reason for the poll other than I'm always curious to see how much content these releases give you all.

2023 Q&A Livestream Recording

Couldn't make it? Had a sportsball event to attend instead? Whatever the reason. here's the recording of today's livestream filled with some reveals, announcements, and answers to everything but what your horoscope is.

Livestream starts in an hour

Get ready and come and join us!

2023 Patron Q&A Livestream

Come and ask your questions this Saturday at 2PM US Eastern Standard Time (convert to your own time zone, as this is UTC -5). Stream will be recorded, in case you can't make it. Feel free to post any questions here, in case you might not make it.

Development Update #76

It's 2023, which I keep forgetting. I wish I could say time flies, but developing games makes you feel like time really drags. The constant development cycle certainly makes for a "Groundhog Day" feeling.

I enjoyed my limited time off and feel very good about how development is going. I did a bit of prioritization and punted a few things to Chapter 12 that I had on my Chapter 11 to do list. Figuring out what you can reasonably get done in a development cycle is half the "fun."

As ...

Happy Holidays from IT Roy

Since it is the holidays, I'm sharing some of the special render set that are normally patron only. Can't share them all since Patreon won't allow nudity on public posts.

My thanks to all of you who enjoy the game, promote it through Discord, social media, etc. A special thanks to those of you who have supported me either on here or by purchasing the game on Steam or Itch. It has been a heck of a year, and I've got even bigger plans in 2023.

Dropping Android Support

I hate to do this mid-development, but I don't see any other choice. I am nearing the 2GB limit for an Android APK, and there isn't any way to split those. With that limit, and the very low numbers of Android downloads, I'll be dropping Android support for subsequent chapters.

If you only use Android to play, and you paid for an annual subscription that has not run out, let me know. I'll do what I can to make things right.

January Livestream

Saturday, January 7 is a big day. I'll be hosting a livestream that day at 2PM US Eastern time. 

While you can look up to see what that means for you, for those in Amsterdam it would be 8PM; Denver, Colorado at 12PM; Melbourne, Australia at 6AM (sorry, Aussies); and Los Angeles, California at 11AM. 

It will be recorded, in case you can't attend live. We will have a good old time, though I'm not going to attempt any multi-tasking by trying to render or anything. I'll be t...

Keep Up-To-Date on Development Progress

A new post over on the website blog letting you all know about how I'm going to keep everyone a bit more informed on development progress as we shift towards longer release cycles.

Development Update #75 - What's on Tap for 2023

A whole lot going on right now at IT Roy HQ. Besides the dog demanding belly rubs and treats, the game is receiving a lot of improvements. Chapter 10 saw a big code overhaul that I planned to do over several releases. I quickly realized that doing it all at once (minus a couple of small things) was the best path. My tremendous thanks to my beta team that had quite a bit on their plate with extra testing for that. Many bugs were found and squashed.

Instead of looking back though, let's c...

Chapter 10 Now Available

What a freaking release! This one kept growing, and it could have grown even more, without aggressive cuts. I am honestly impressed I wrapped this up in about three months. There is a LOT new in here, so read these release notes thoroughly. I'm going to point out two very big things.

Firstly, there is a whole new points system for the second time in TBaK's history. I really hope this is its final form. Why I did a new points system is a much longer discussion for a futu...

Chapter 10 Release Date

Oh yeah. It's time to announce a release date. Watch the video for details.