DriftyGames

Dev Diary, April 7th, 2023

I've put a bit of effort into the story scenes this week. The work folder shows 1,723 renders, which should be an increase of about 135 renders posed, rendered, and post-worked.

Now that most of the story renders are done, I'll continue posing scene transitions, animations, and generally working on my list of things to do before it's complete.

I've held back on some functions that are not 100% needed for episode one in case I'm running short on time. This includes user-defined mus...

Dev Diary, March 31st, 2023

I've been mostly banging my head against the quirks of Daz studio this week.

One of the 3d assets I'm using, which is also a big part of the environment of u4ia, has been a major pain in the ass. There's nothing more annoying than waking up in the morning only to see that all the night renders are a bunch of black screens.

But somehow I got through them all, adding and doing the post work on 137 renders, which now totals 1,587.

I expect four more weeks of heavy rendering, an...

Dev Diary, March 24th, 2023

Won't bother you with a big wall of text this time. Just dropping by to say it's going forward at a steady pace.

I've made myself a bullet list of things to do, and I'm just focusing on crossing out one thing after the other.

The script(s) size is around 10k lines of code/dialogue right now. That's just shy of LoF chapter 8 size, but I do expect it to grow quite a bit yet.

For the renders, I haven't been doing a lot these last few weeks, as I really had to try catching up wi...

Dev Diary, March 17th, 2023

In this part of development, I'm putting all the scenes and dialogues into RenPy, and rendering extra images where needed. It's a fairly simple process and just about getting everything working as it should, and in some cases, even the dialogue is kind of uninspiring and bland - but it's just about getting it all in there.

When that's all done, hopefully, I'll have a few weeks available where I put in the actual finished version of dialogues and add visuals. To compare with LoF, it's sc...

Dev Diary, March 10th, 2023

As you might have noticed, the trailer and release date for u4ia is out. Hope you enjoyed it, and it's not meant to reveal much of the story, just to give a general idea of what the game is about. If you didn't see it, the release date is May 5th, and you can view the trailer here.

I didn't plan on releasing the trailer just yet, but I got the ok to use music from an external source, and since that was p...

U4IA - Trailer and Release date!

Enjoy

Dev Diary, March 3rd, 2023

This had been another week spent in Ren'Py improving the general look and feel of the game. It's slightly annoying having to do these things and it is the only time during development I wish I could clone myself and do several things at once. But then again, it's something I only have to do once, and they will last the full game.

Overall, I have added more than 300 ui elements so far, and I'm starting to see the end of it. 3/4 free-roams are done, and the phone is taking shape. I know t...

Dev Diary, February 24th, 2023

I saw a question last week about the music and if I would use artists from the LoF soundtrack in u4ia. I'm having talks with a few of those artists, and they will be included for u4ia with new songs. Although, for the most part, the new game will have music from artists not connected to LoF.

For actual progress, I've spent almost all my time in Ren'Py. My head and eyes are adapting to the more complex scripting, and all in all it's fun to expand a bit upon the normal 'dialogue and choic...

Leap of Faith on GOG.com

Leap of Faith is now available on GOG.com.

If you've been holding back on buying it, now's a good time with a limited launch discount.

https://www.gog.com/game/leap_of_faith 

Cheers, and have a nice weekend.

Dev Diary, February 17th, 2023

Another week where I've been progressing on several fronts.

I made the first full scene with the girl you see up there. I was a bit worried initially, as I'd never done anything remotely similar before, but it was great fun doing and she's grown on me.

Although, trying to get on her good side is a bit like jumping into the rabbit hole... with your eyes closed.

Other than that, I took a deep dive into Ren'Py and worked on that part of the process. Without having done the scri...

Dev Diary, February 10th, 2023

Leap of Faith SFW?
I've been keeping myself updated on your comments from last week's poll. Even though a #SFW rework of LoF was downvoted, I was honestly surprised by the interest in it.

I know that by having a vote that doesn't have a landslide victory, I've set myself up to upsetting either end by trying to satisfy either those for or against, but I'll have a quick look at converting LoF to SFW by simply removing NSFW content. If this is something I can do by not ...

Dev Diary, February 2nd, 2023

This week, my computer has been working its way through the render queue while I had to tend to quite a few other things.

Leap of Faith is coming to GOG.com
And since it was #NSFW-week on gog.com, I and my representative there decided to give it a push to get the store page up. It took slightly longer than expected due to some dlc problems and I no longer had the old promotion video, so I had to make a new one. And I had to keep changing it because Youtube kept taggi...

Dev Diary, January 27th, 2023

I had this animation I posed a while back that I wasn't sure I was going to use as an intro, as it is a huge one with no lewds. But I decided to go ahead with it in the end, and that thing took 5 days to render, which is most of what my rendering rig has been doing this week. A full 2,200 frames of animation were added.

That gave me a bit of time to look into Renpy, and work on some game functionality, rather than visuals.

If you remember in Leap of Faith, you could give yourself ...

Dev Diary, January 20th, 2023

This week was a bit of an all-types-of-work week.

I spent some time in Premiere Pro with post-production on the animations that have finished rendering, and that's when I noticed that some of the more 'wigglier' parts of the girls which I had animated, didn't wiggle anymore.

You see, Daz is a good program for doing a lot of things, but it comes with quite a few quirks. When I save a file on my posing rig and load it into the render-rig for the actual rendering, there's a huge poss...

Dev Diary, January 13th, 2023

I've only been doing story renders this week, and have been working myself through some really enjoyable scenes.

I love making these scenes where you spend some time together with the girls one on one and get to know them a bit better. Most of the time it's not that they are actually sharing past secrets, but the way they react to you telling some of yours. This is something I used in Leap of Faith too when you sit on the bench with Cece in the park and she starts crying. I think it's a...

Dev Diary, January 6th, 2023

The first post of the new year, and I have to tell you it's still weird not having to drive anywhere to work. But it's nice looking out the window at the neighbor de-icing his car and not having to do that.

I said I would give you a little insight into the new game U4IA, so here it is, trying to spoil as little as possible in the process.

Synopsis
You've been having a pretty shitty life so far, and a friend of yours recommends you travel to this island in the C...

Dev Diary, December 30th, 2022

It's the last post of the year, and this time I'll tell you a bit about getting music for the new game. It's more informational and meant for other AVN developers and those who wonder what's going on. Jump to the end to skip it.

Music Licensing

In all of December, I've been having talks with Premiumbeat about using their song library in my next game, u4ia, as I really wanted to get this expense on this year's budget.

I read through their terms and...

Dev Diary, December 23rd, 2022

I've been writing these dev updates from the time I had 7 Patreons back at the start of 2020, and I never really let it sink in that I have a much bigger audience now than I used to back then. And with this post being open for all, well, that number is quite a bit higher.

Christmas for me is always about being able to sit down and think about what I've got, instead of what I could have had. I don't have a mansion to live in, but I have a nice house still. I don't have a Ferrari, but I e...

Dev Diary, December 16th, 2022

First of all, thank you very much for the kind and heartfelt messages I got in response to the last dev diary. I know that there are always people who will not see eye to eye with the story I wanted to tell with Leap of Faith or how I went about it, but you certainly put a smile on my face.

Other than that, it's pretty much back to normal for the development on u4ia for this week. I've started the more fun scenes, to which I've been posing animations, and they are running as we speak. N...

Dev Diary, December 9th, 2022

I've been talking about taking some time off after Leap of Faith, and nothing came off it. On this Monday, I woke up to a particularly awful message about me and the game, and although I've got quite hard skin against opinionated comments differentiating from my own, this one really hit home.

I normally appreciate different opinions and welcome them, but this was very hateful and derogatory - a very personal attack not only against me but also against the inspiration for the game which ...

Dev Diary, December 2nd, 2022

Animations have been running almost none stop this week. While they were rendering, I've been focusing on the Ren'Py part and got a decent chunk done. Numbers are at 860 story renders and 3,474 animated frames.

I wanted to tell you a bit about what -u4ia- will be like, now that I'm getting into the real scripting part of it and see that it's achievable in the way I planned it out.

u4ia is more like a game than Leap of Faith, and will consist of three types of 'modes'. Each chapter...

Dev Diary, November 25th, 2022

I've been stretching myself in all directions this week and made progress on all fronts. I completed two scenes on the story render side, caught up on the custom renders for the top Patreon tier, and right now animations are rendering none stop while I'm working on the Renpy part.

Also finished 'designing' another girl as you can see above, and I'm very happy with the way the pbr shader help en...

Dev Diary, November 18th, 2022

Progress
Another week where I've been working on the big free-roam. The most exciting news this week was my neighbor building a house and unintentionally cutting the power for everyone in the street.

While he was nice enough to apologize and buy flowers for pretty much everybody, it did cause a slight delay.

Numbers are at about 776 story renders plus about 100 I don't count due to them being used as sprites, background movement, and similar. Animations took a ...

Dev Diary, November 11th, 2022

This week has mostly been spent working on the main free-roam renders of the episode. To give you a rough idea of its size, it spans over three floors, and I've been working my way through the first one counting more than 30 unique characters in it so far. The chance you're going to leave that place with a girl for some fun is rather high if that's your goal. But there are many other outcomes too.

I'll continue working on it for the next week, and I'll also start focusing on the animati...

Dev Diary, November 4th, 2022

Holy crap. Is it November already?

Progress
My normal job demanded a bit extra this week, and that stole a few evenings of development. Luckily it doesn't happen too often - I think this is the third time over two and a half years of making this it has. From 2023 that's guaranteed to never ever be a problem ever again as you might know, I'm going full-time dev from January 1st.

Numbers are at 617 story renders, while animations had a week of a standstill at 1,7...

Dev Diary, October 28th, 2022

So, for the result of last week's poll, a whopping 74% of you want to set up the sidekick with one of the main girls of the story, 20% of you want a dedicated girl for him, 5% do not want him with any girl, and the last 1% doesn't need him in the game.

I still feel setting him up with a dedicated girl would have had the potential for some fun scenes, even on the lewd side, but I'll twist my head a bit until we get to that point.

Otherwise, my Daz problems are now ok and we're back...

Dev Diary, October 21th, 2022

I know that technically, Leap of Faith is released and done, but I got a chance to add four songs so I thought: heck, why not.

The songs will be added this weekend to the final release on Steam, and as a patch/full download for the current Patreon release.

The songs are all from Katrina Stone, and they are:

• Love Automatic
• My Own Back
• You and the Summer
• Raincheck

Of course, I will also consider Michael Shynes if he were to get back...

Illustrated Dev Diary, October 14th, 2022

This part of development is mostly a render marathon, so it's basically just me posing scenes and sending them to the render queue. Rinse and repeat. There was still quite a bit of animation renders going through the machinery this week as the intro of u4ia is somewhat animation heavy, but that's almost done and for the next weeks the focus is story renders and progression.

I'm very happy about how the scenes pan out, and I try to make at least 2-3 variations of each scene, giving you a...

Dev Diary, October 14th, 2022

This part of development is mostly a render marathon, so it's basically just me posing scenes and sending them to the render queue. Rinse and repeat. There was still quite a bit of animation renders going through the machinery this week as the intro of u4ia is somewhat animation heavy, but that's almost done and for the next weeks the focus is story renders and progression.

I'm very happy about how the scenes pan out. Many scenes will have at least 2-3 variations of each scene, giving y...

Illustrated Dev Diary, October 7th, 2022

I can't even begin to tell you how much fun I'm having with the u4ia so far. In fact, I'm enjoying it so much that I forgot today was dev diary day, which is why this is a little later than normal for the update.

Though, as the new art style is hugely improved, it also takes longer to render. Animations take 4 times as long, and story renders take 15 times longer than they did for LoF. So it was easy to build up a queue, and I'm now rendering 24/7.

I don't expect this to be a huge...