domiek
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Dev Talk - Cool Story Bro
🕑 Added 2022-10-09 18:31:07 +0000 UTCDecided to make this Dev Talk public as Patrons were already more or less aware of some of these hardships.
Overall I'm feeling relieved and good about episode two. It was well received but also did have some fair criticism over the long development cycle. I've briefly touched on some of the pain points in the past, but will summarize them again. I wanted to wait until the episode release before publicly coming out with the typical dev excuses. Are porn devs the unluckiest and most miserable people on the planet? Tune in at 10.
TL/DR: The complaints are all valid. The original goal was for 3-4 months development cycles but 2022 decided that anal hemorrhage was the far better outcome.
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I released episode one at the end of January and was aiming for a late spring/early summer release of episode two. Things obviously did not go as planned.
Moving: I found out that I'll be moving to the other side of the world at the end of the year. This forced a home remodel that my wife has been insisting on for years so that we could rent or sell at a reasonable rate. This took a month to complete where my office was inaccessible. The only game related development I could do was writing the episode on my laptop at the end of the day.
Blender Bug: Blender Cycles decided to introduce a seizure inducing strobe light bug on all animations. Single renders were fine but as soon as animation was introduced, all character hair started pulsing like a disco ball. I spent a week trying to resolve this issue before losing my mind and switching to Octane Render out of frustration. The initial tests gave great results, so I spent the next month manually rebuilding every shader from Cycles to Octane. I'm not exaggerating when I say this was 8-10 hour days of mind numbing labor, manually selecting and rebuilding the shader of every surface on every asset. Once production started full swing again, I realized Octane doesn't handle Blender particle hair well at all. The viewport would not update for 5+ seconds and render times took 2-3x longer.
This issue was not visible during testing because the tests were run on single characters & environments independently where the performance issues were not noticeable. Only once I started full production scenes with multiple characters + full environments did that 2-3x performance hit become apparent. By the time this was discovered, Blender fixed the strobe light bug and I was back to Cycles. The silver lining I tell myself to keep from crying is that rebuilding all the shaders in Octane taught me that some of my Cycles shaders were built incorrectly, which I was able to address. You may have noticed earlier in the episode that the renders appear to be different, because they were.
Elder Abuse: This was the biggest factor to slowing down development. I don't want to go into details of this personal matter, but my physically declining elderly father was being financially exploited and abused by his much younger wife. We're talking sleep deprivation, isolation and possibly over the counter medication to pacify him. There was a 3 month period where I'd be driving between two cities or making phone calls for 10-12 hours a day. My diet for most of these days were two packs of cigarettes and coffee until things settled down at night and I was able to eat something solid.
On the bright side, this was a great weight loss program. Maybe I'll add a new Patreon tier to sell you this one trick personal trainers don't want you to know about!
This issue is not entirely over but it's now in the hands of the government so my involvement is very minimal.
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Episode 3
Unfortunately, 2022 will still continue being a pain in my ass. I still have to deal with all of the logistics of moving across the world. I've mostly ignored all of this until I could get episode two out, but now it's time to start taking care of everything I've neglected. I need to plan on how to make this move smooth with as little downtime as possible for developing the next episode. We're provided a shipping container but this can take months to arrive at our new home. Hell, we haven't even found a place yet.
I'll be working as much as possible on the game until mid December, where I will need to part out my computer. I'll bring my GPU's and hard drives in my luggage and end up building a new PC so that I won't have to sit around for months waiting for the shipping container to arrive. The silver lining once again is that this gives me a good excuse to upgrade my first generation ryzen CPU, which will greatly reduce the time in posing, animating and simulations.
I don't expect episode three to take 9 months like episode two, but it will surely not be the 3-4 month original target. I expect to find consistency in a release schedule sometime by early 2023 once we've settled in our new home on the other side of the world.
Thank you all for your support and patience. I was feeling extremely down and doubting myself when releasing episode two, but your great feedback really brought some warmth and happiness to an otherwise miserable year.
Cheers,
Dom
Comments
Domiek
Thanks! I have a sound licensing text file in the game directory with each song listed by episode.
Mipecio
Btw, any chance to get a soundtrack list? I've found most of the songs by using Shazam but I think it would still be a nice feature. The songs you used in scenes are just perfect and I thank you for adding new cool songs to my list.
Domiek
Wow, what a comment. Thank you!
Mipecio
I've been depressed most of my life. Your game brought joy to my life. I love the humor and characters in your game. It's a beautifully made masterpiece!
Gn753
Sorry to hear about all the turbulence in your life. I wish you resilience through it all. As for the release of the next episode, I know that I can wait patiently for it so no rush from me!
