Developers Diary 6.

Hey everyone!

Another quick update on the development progress!

Just so you don't think the project has stalled :)

It hasn't! On the contrary, things are moving along quite quickly. I've finished working on the graphical part... well, almost finished—animation rendering for the Steam trailer is still ongoing. There is one long 5-minute animation, and due to the file size, it had to be split into 5 parts and rendered separately because Daz3D can't handle that many keyframes and crashes. Each of these 5 parts takes roughly 36 hours of continuous rendering... Yes, 36 freaking hours! And that's not even at the highest quality—otherwise, it would take forever, even on an RTX4090 graphics card. Again, each part takes 36 hours...

The only upside is that it doesn't really interfere with working on other game elements.

Right now, I'm assembling the renders into the actual game build, which is actually a pretty quick task, though this time it's a bit trickier because we now have a Freeroaming system. I haven't done anything like this before, so I'm figuring it out from scratch. Thankfully, AI is helping a lot since I'm not great at programming. It's genuinely an exciting process, and I'm really enjoying designing it. Of course, I do look at code and implementation examples from other games, but my solution is turning out a bit differently because the approaches I've seen don't seem structured or convenient enough (in terms of code organization, scripts, file storage). So, the result is something original, though I risk encountering issues down the line that I might have missed initially :)) Hopefully, nothing serious will crop up.

The technical part is already done, and I'm currently working on creating locations. The first location added was Angel's room (the main heroine), then the corridor on the second floor, and the retractable staircase to the attic. These two locations, plus creating the system itself with scene rotation within locations and time-of-day changes, took three full working days, 8-12 hours each.

Four more locations need to be finished for the demo; that'll probably take another couple of days. Afterward, I'll start adding the remaining renders to the game. Overall, I think the game, without sound and video, will be ready within five working days.

That leaves animation voice-overs, adding them into the game, plus audio design (music, sounds, ambiance), and basic main menu design. Will I manage to finish all this by July 16th? It will be challenging, but there's a chance.

In any case, thank you for your support here on Patreon! It REALLY means a lot and helps maintain motivation to release the game as soon as possible!