2021-07-02 News

Hello again friends. Time for a little news.

Progress

Progress on the game continues unabated. Albeit a little slow these last two weeks because of the real job encroaching on my time. But that aside we're moving along well. I'm in the middle of three new chapters and a single update chapter and we're about half way on each.

My plan is to shift focus a bit for the next couple of weeks and work on driving the to completion one by one.

The writing for the previous poll winners was completed but I'm holding off on another art vote until I get these next chapters done and released. Then we'll fire up the cycle again near the middle/end of July to determine what content we'll produce in August.

Toolbox

Between working on renders I've been slowly expanding my 3D tool set. I've recently gotten a grip on volumetric lighting from scratch as well as surfacing and texturing in Substance Painter. I've made a number of custom props already for the game and have a few rooms for upcoming scenes in the pipeline.

At this point I've sent enough assets back and forth through Daz, Blender and Substance that I'm finally feeling at ease with the process and can jump back and forth with ease. This means custom props can be rapidly built, textured and imported into the game rapidly.

Is that all?!

I really wish I had more to share than that, but what can I say, we're sailing along now.

We all hoped that sooner or later these news reports were going to get briefer and briefer as we slowly conquered all the challenges we faced making this game.

So in that regard I'm happy to say we're still in a good spot. Code writes itself. Custom assets are now within our ability to make freeing us up to tell any story we'd like. And well, the story has been plotted start to finish and all that remains is to finish writing the scenes.

Test renders are being posted regularly again on the Discord for those unable or unwilling to watch the live streams. So yeah. Here we are!

Anyway, that's all I got for now. I'm going to keep jamming on this game and with all due luck we'll see one or more updates before the end of July.

Fingers crossed!

Cheers mates and thanks for the support.

Salute!

2021-06-16 News

Alright, let's do this one more time from the top!

It's official, I'm sick of writing!

But on the upside I have a shit ton of first draft and plot structure laid out. On the one hand it's been very invigorating doing so much writing these last few weeks. Once I had the plot lines for initial characters laid down a wave of inspiration washed over me and I had all these ideas in my head I wanted to lay down. But after a few weeks of developing story, I'm ready to get back to the meat and bones of things.

Polls will resume at the end of next week as we start deciding which characters' stories to lay down in final draft. This week and next I want to finish up the artwork for the chapters we currently have in production. We're about halfway done with three chapters and I want to see those get wrapped up before moving on to the next stage.

I realized today that I haven't signed on to Patreon since the last news update, so I have some messages I need to respond to as well as making the rounds on the forums and discord.

I'll spend some time today and tomorrow playing catch up on the messages and replying to all of you who've been so patiently awaiting my attention.

I'll probably start back in with some streaming tomorrow and Friday as I hammer out the remaining artwork for the chapters in progress. Currently we have Emily, Lupita and Jane all in various stages of completion.

My tentative goal for July is to have all three completed and ready for release. That means July should be a three chapter month if all proceeds on track. I pretty much have all the assets I need and the characters are finalized. So let's push this through and get another big release going for next month.

That's pretty much all I got for now. We'll talk soon!

2021-06-04

You know the drill, so let's do it.

All Quiet on the Amana Front?

True, I haven't been as present as I normally am. For some strange reason these last few weeks I've been riding this creative high and I don't know when it'll stop. At this point I've learned to identify these little bouts of creative energy when they come and I take full advantage of them when they come.

That said, I've been laying down a lot of groundwork on the story. As previously mentioned I had been working ruthlessly on the script and had finished mapping out a three act story arc for each character. Well as soon as I had that done, I suddenly found myself amid a storm of ideas and have been scrambling to get them down in text.

So now for many characters I've not only got the three act plot laid down, but have also mapped out the five chapter arc for the first act. All first/rough draft story that will be the bones upon which we write our final draft.

And in the process of building out those initial chapters, I've started discovering new things about my characters. Story ideas and personality traits that were apparently waiting to be discovered. Jane in particular started to reveal some pretty interesting things to me during her initial chapter planning.

I've always had a rough idea of who Jane is, but it turns out there were parts of her personality and character that she had been waiting to reveal. And so while her and a few other characters have undergone a bit of a social redesign, rest assured that nothing you've love about her has been taken away. She's still the Jane you knew before. Now she just has some deeper thoughts, desires and motivations that you've yet to uncover. And it's these little details that help bring her and other characters to life by freeing them up from two-dimensionality.

All in all I've plotted about 30 chapters in the last couple of weeks and I have a handful more I want to get out of my head and into Scrivener before I take a break. The writing process is starting to take a bit of a toll and I can feel the exhaustion starting to creep in. That's usually the sign that I need to lay down the pen and paper for a bit and get back to running the artwork for a change of pace.

And the Streams?

Obviously streaming me generating story ideas and writing down text in scrivener isn't very riveting material. Plus it provides way too many spoilers. My goal for this next week is to finish the first five chapters that comprise Act I for each character. That gives us around 60 chapters waiting for a final draft that we can vote on and begin working toward completion. Also this week I'll probably stream my progress on finalizing character design.

My presets in Daz have gotten a bit outta whack and I need to comb through everything and make sure the surfaces are updated and everyone is ready for immediate drop into the story. I started this process the other day with a small stream and will continue it through the week so we can finish up character design. After that we'll be back to regularly streaming art work and pushing out play tests.

Oh, and I can't count!

Last report I said we had 13 possible love interests. Not sure what happened or who I forgot, but it turns out there are 14. In alphabetical order they are:

Amanda Campbell Anne Templeton Candice McCreary Cassie H.......olliday! Emily Harrington Jane Howard Kim Teak Lita Lola Lupita Rosales Monica Williams & Sharice Johnson Nanami Sakamura Raena Larson Sarah Cartier

As we work on finalizing the character designs, I'll post up the character introduction sheets and confirm their completion.

That's it for now...

Still a lot of work to do, but the final vision of this game is coming quickly into view. All that's left is chipping away at the art and final drafts to bring it in. Can't wait to get back to work on the art with you on the live streams. Till then, Salute!

2021-05-27 News I know it's been a hot minute since we dropped some news. So let me take some time now to bring you up to speed.

It's been a busy couple of weeks to be certain. And the work I've been doing wasn't really anything streamable. What have I been working on? Well I'm glad you asked.

Asset Pipeline

I've been putting in quite a bit of time these last few weeks ironing out all the kinks in the asset development process. There has been quite a bit of trial and error still, but now things seems to be worked out. I was doing a lot of testing across software platforms and it was easier to just have all the software up and bounce back and forth between them to see how changes reflected. So because I was running three different pieces of software at once and two were generally rendering at the same time, streaming was infeasible.

But now that I've got a tentative processes flowing I can stream some of this work going forward since I shouldn't need to run everything simultaneously as I now have an idea of what to expect when moving between them.

Story Structure

It was past time I started looking at the whole story and where we were going. To this point I've been writing the story a chapter at a time with a general idea of where we're going. However, now that we've picked up the pace and I'm writing multiple scenes week it was time to iron everything out flat.

It took a few days, but I finally have the rest of the game generally mapped out. To ease development process this required a little bit of restructuring of the story. Now don't worry, we didn't lose anything. But some of the previous chapters are being broken up into smaller chapters and within those smaller chapters some scenes are getting added content.

To keep the story flowing smoothly and avoid having to write too many alternate scenes and branching paths, I've begun to minimize some of the cross over story arcs and prune up a few of the over hanging branches. This will reduce redundancy and also free up the players to skip some characters entirely if they choose. As it was previously laid out, there were some scenes that needed to fire off in sequence and had to be completed to open up other characters stories.

This is no longer the case as I want players to be able to freely pick and choose which characters they want to engage with. This required a bit more compartmentalization of each character's story and free me up from trying to track and develop ways to get information to the character that may be buried in a scene they'll never play because they don't want to interact with a specific love interest.

Characters will of course show up in each other's stories and complications will ensue. It's just that the individual plots no longer require you to play a different character's chapter before you can advance in your current love interest's story.

Chapter Map

I've also completely laid out the story lines for each love interest in rough draft. Once more for ease and speed of development, I've decided to break up the story for each love interest into a traditional three act story. Each act will consist of five or six chapters while each chapter will consist of five or six scenes with a minimum of 2,500 words.

For a long time I've been saying, I know where the story is going but am still working out how it gets there. Well, that's done. I've now worked out how we get there. That does mean the chapters will be smaller. But they'll also be faster to write and faster to render.

And so each love interest in the game will get around 75 total scenes in the game from start to finish.

I also plan to add additional Doctor Amana chapters between the Acts for each character.

Oh yeah, speaking of characters...

Final Casting Complete

I have finally hit the limit on possible love interests in the game. Not that we can't always use more, it's just that I have covered a lot of ground with the characters I have and the sheer diversity is enough to keep me satisfied.

In total it looks like we're going to have 13 Possible Love Interests. None are exclusive and many of them are connected or have internal relationships of their own. So while the individual plots of these characters have been separated, there is still a lot of cross over happening to pull all the stories together.

With a lot of that worked out now I plan to continue with the streaming either tomorrow or Monday, time permitting. I've got another play test ready in the hopper and it's just waiting on music and a final code sweep and it should be ready for upload. So tomorrow may end up going into that. We'll see.

In any case, we'll talk soon.

Salute!