DriftyGames

Dev Diary, April 25th, 2025

Quick update this week.

I spent almost all week in Renpy, doing scripting. More than 4000 lines of dialogue were done, and as of yesterday, I fully caught up with all the visuals. I also posed and rendered additional supplementary images to the existing scenes where I felt more visuals were needed.

With all that out of the way, I'm jumping right into the last half of development and will try to set myself a date I can work towards.

And to quote Ron Burgundy: Stay classy, San...

Dev Diary, April 18th, 2025

With easter arriving, I had plans to put in some good work hours and get a lot of renders out of the way.

My family had other plans, though, so work became a trip instead.

In short, I let my render queue continue rendering and brought my laptop so I could catch up on the scripts and dialogue.

The result was 700 animated frames and 2,500 lines of script/dialogue, and I realized just how far behind I was on the scripting.

Whenever I pose the images, I always have the dia...

Dev Diary, April 11th, 2025

Another week of steady progress.

I'm working through some lewd scenes, and while they are fun to make, general progress always seems slower on the lewd'er weeks even though the hours put in are the same. Two weeks of animation work can amount to one or two minutes of playtime and doesn't make any headway towards the end of the episode, whereas two weeks of story renders can make me tick several things on my checklist.

An easy way to compare my progress to the release schedule is b...

Dev Diary, April 4th, 2025

Heavy focus on the animations this week. In fact, that's all I've done. The final animation was completed, post-worked, and saved right before writing this, which wraps up Nyah's special moment.

As mentioned earlier, Nyah is based on the Genesis 9 model, so this was the first time I've animated Genesis 9. It's a lot of fun doing new things, and it really made me appreciate that model more, as it's more versatile than the much more used Genesis 8.1 version.

To give an example, even...

Dev Diary, March 28th, 2025

Oh boy, this was a fun week. I had a basic idea of how spending a night with Nyah was going to be, but I let the scenery and chemistry between the MC and Nyah decide what happened. And she's got some fun quirks you haven't seen yet, so hopefully, you'll have as much fun playing it, as I did making it.

All in all, it turned out to be a 200 render 'date' with her - before the real fun starts. Worrying I had gone overboard on the renders, I took a quick comparison with the Lexi sushi/cupca...

Dev Diary, March 21st, 2025

As I've mentioned before, not every week is spent entirely in Daz Studio, posing renders. This week, I had to attend to several other matters.

In short, I've renewed my music licenses, completed the accounting report for last year, and had some initial talks with voice actors for the game. This is not for voice acting all the dialogues but to add some more immersion to the NSFW scenes. If you have any favorite NSFW voice actors you'd like me to reach out to, please feel free to mention ...

Dev Diary, March 14th, 2025

As we're getting close to our little undercover mission with Samantha and Celeste, we'll obviously have some fun, too. And by that, I mean a whole lot of fun.

Or, to echo Sam, let's go wild.

Now that I've gotten into the animations with Celeste, as suspected, she renders very slowly compared to everyone else. Which is reflected in the numbers this week. 78 renders and 642 frames of anima...

Dev Diary, March 7th, 2025

I'll try not to take too much of your time today. Judging by some of your profile pictures, I suspect you may be busy elsewhere. :)

I've been putting in extra effort as I'm getting closer to the inevitable animation bottleneck, so I got quite a few renders done. 189 story renders and 610 animated frames were the result this week.

Lin and Geneva have been the two major focus points this week, but I also ran into both Lars and Synne along the way. Nyah, Celeste, and Samantha are up ...

Dev Diary, February 28th, 2025

So, I'm back on track after being sick for a while and have been working full hours all week. 139 story renders, and 1202 frames of animation were done.

I had planned this one scene for several years now, and I knew it would be difficult to make because it packs a powerful emotional punch. I did it this week, and it was indeed challenging to do, but that turned out to be nothing compared to when I saw the completed version with the audio and visuals put together.

I strongly feel t...

Dev Diary, February 21st, 2025

Uh, I hate being sick. But I still completed more than 100 renders, which means we've surpassed the 1,000 mark, so it's not a complete dud week.

That means I'm just about done with the first of three days in the episode, which has several unique paths you can pick and choose from. I only have one free-roam planned for this episode, which is your little trip with Celeste and Sam. But there will be five different ways to end it.

I've also started experimenting with how to transfer s...

Dev Diary, February 14th, 2025

Got about 100 renders done this week. The reason for the lower-than-average numbers is that I got sick earlier in the week. Decided to go to the doctor and got the results back yesterday. Seems I have the Rhinovirus. And as ridiculous as that sounds, I haven't got any horns growing anywhere recently. It's just a name for a virus that pops up this time of the year.

The downside is that it supposedly lasts for 2-4 weeks, so I'm chewing some c-vitamins to help fight it.

I'm still wor...

Dev Diary, February 7th, 2025

This was another week where rendering animations took almost all of it. The result was 2,350 new frames of animation and 59 new story renders.

I'm shifting my focus back to story renders for now so that I feel I'm making some headway with the actual story. Rendering animations is a nice break from the good old routine, but sometimes it feels like a pause in the actual progress as it's very time-consuming.

I've attached an animation to showcase just how good upscaling and frame-dou...

Dev Diary, January 31st, 2025

This week was all about Roxy and the shenanigans you two are up to in her store, and I've mostly finished posing it. 123 story renders and 1223 frames of animation were finished.

I think I measured my maximum output capacity for one week at some point, which is about 260 story renders or 2,600 frames of animation (or a combination of those two). So it's up there with what I can output in a week - if you count in about 400 frames of animation which I had to scrap and redo, due to a visua...

Dev Diary, January 24th, 2025

After the big wall of text last week, I'll try to keep it short and to the point this week. But thanks for all the nice comments and feedback.

I've put most of my efforts into animations, as I posed and rendered the first lewd scene of the chapter. It got me a bit worried since it was nine days of rendering with a girl that renders fast, and I have a lot of scenes planned.

Since the number of animations per scene is quite a bit higher than in the early days - somewhere around 15-...

5 years in the making, and answering questions.

Seeing as today is pretty much exactly 5 years since I sat down with Daz Studio and Ren'Py and decided to make a Visual Novel, I thought I'd take a little trip down memory lane with you all, and look back at how it all started. I also encouraged you to send me questions for an AMA, which you'll find the answers to further down this post.

The beginning.

So, it's the 16th of January 2020, and the new thing everyone is talking about is Covid, mouth protection masks, and being less ...

Dev Diary and AMA questions

I worked myself through a few more scenes and finally got to the animation stage by the end of the week, giving me a bit of a breather due to the time they take to render.

Setting up the girls has been slightly trickier than usual, as, in addition to new clothes, some also have new hairdos to fit the scene. Hair doesn't always come in exactly the color you want, so it required a bit of Photoshop work to match the color of their original hair. To make things worse, Teagan and Roxanne's o...

Dev Diary, January 3rd, 2025

Happy New Year to you all, and thank you for the one that just ended. It seems we all survived another trip around the sun.

I thought I'd start the new year by giving some insight about this mechanic you've most probably seen by now.

The heart choice is romantic, and the kiss is the 'friends with benefits' option. The reason these choices were ...

Merry Christmas

I suppose it wouldn't be a proper Christmas before Cece stops by. I think she stole one of Santa's deer this time. Misc versions of the images are attached.

Have a nice rest of the year, and I'll see you all again early in the next one.

And once again, thank you for the support!

// Drifty

Dev Diary, December 20th, 2024

I just finished post-work on the completed renders and animations a few minutes ago, so I've caught up on that end. The work folder shows 401 completed renders and 995 frames of animations.

The pacing of the start of this episode is quite fast, and to show the difference between the start of this and the last - at the 400 render mark of the last episode we were still at the beach in the beginning, while in this episode I've worked my way through 5 different locations.

The pacing w...

Dev Diary, December 13th, 2024

FRIDAY THE 13TH! - but no hiccups yet.

Since I'm working on the last episode of the season where everything leads down to one singular event that's the same for everyone, I realized I had to do a lot of wardrobe preparations for it.

Fun fact: in episode 3, if you played it, the MC changes his clothes at the back of Sam and Celeste's car in the end. This was because I had made this type of wardrobe error, where I had rendered the end scene early on, but used a different wardrobe e...

Dev Diary, December 6th, 2024

I've been continuing working on the story before it leads to some serious pathing. One of the reasons for the pathing is, of course, getting serious with the girl(s) you want to and continuing the actual story.

So I had to make some changes to the episode roadmap to make sure that both the story and romancing paths lead into the inevitable season ending where you'll learn that everything is connected somehow. The changes are mostly that you'll have a greater choice of skipping girls you...

Dev Diary, November 29th, 2024

The render marathon has definitely begun. The numbers are at 154 story renders, and 729 animated frames so far, and I've worked my way through the prologue and all the versions of the intro.

For the preview this time, it's you and Nyah on the bench again. This time the roles are reversed.

One thing I love about Nyah is that she changes slightly from episode to episode, and I feel I've be...

Dev Diary, November 22nd, 2024

Not too much exciting to report this week, but I still kept me busy the whole week.

I started off by making some changes to the already released ep3, where I added shortcuts to the mansion and beach free-roams. This should make replays a little less tedious, or more enjoyable if you're not a fan of them.

I also planned out the roadmap and script for episode 4. There are a lot of scenes there I'm really looking forward to doing. Amongst them, some pull on the heartstrings, proper r...

Post release Dev Diary

Just dropping by with a quick post today.

First of all, I hope you enjoyed the release.

Of course, it became extremely eventful with all the bug reports. The odd thing was that I couldn't see the bugs myself, so it took a lot of people to help me test and try to fix bugs I couldn't see.

After five days of testing, I found out that the bugs were all related to switching Ren'Py version for this release, so when I reverted back to the previous version, everything worked fine. 2024-11-15 15:29:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Public Service Announcement concerning U4iA - Episode 3

Important - Please Read!

If you downloaded or played any previous U4iA - Episode 3 release, your current saves are not usable in the current (v3.1p) or future versions. Your current persistent file (seen dialogue blocks, gallery unlocks etc) is also corrupt, and will be deleted on your first time loading v3.1p.

I am truly sorry about this, but Ren'Py 8.3.2 which the first episode 3 releases was compiled on has a serious bug that corrupts you...