2021-09-10

A little treat for a Friday afternoon after a week well worked.

And remember, Patrons and Subscribers have access to the NSFW version of the attached wallpaper.

Everyone have a great weekend and I'll see you next week.

Salute!

2021-09-06

Originally my plan was to do a regular live stream today. Then I realized today was a holiday and now the whole afternoon is thrown out of whack. I still plan to work on the game today but unfortunately the five or so hours I wanted to put in will be broken up over the course of the whole day instead of an uninterrupted block as planned. That said I won’t be posting a hard Picarto time, but will be on an off periodically throughout the day. House is full so it’ll be a no-mic kind of day and I’ll probably use the time to finalize some character design.

But rest assured, I plan to be back Wednesday for a normal day of work and a full 2-3 hours of live streaming.

In the meantime, everyone have a great day and we’ll talk soon.

https://picarto.tv/doctoramana

2021-09-03

Good morning everyone. I know it’s been awhile since we had a chat and for that I apologize. I’ve only got a few things to run over with you and then we’ll get back to work immediately. I promise.

For starters, I want to apologize for ghosting you for part of July and all of August. Those who’ve followed the game for a while know it is highly uncharacteristic of my chatty ass to go so long without a peep. For reasons of personal privacy I won’t go into all of the specifics, but I can give you the broad details.

The company that I work for had a data breach at the beginning of July and this launched me head first into overtime and travel pay as I had the inglorious job of visiting our data centers. It’s shit work. And I’ve spent more time in airport terminals and hotels than any person should have to. Between laptops, shitty hotel wifi, company networks and being run ragged from sunrise to sunset, I unceremoniously put all my PR work on hold and doubled down.

I guess after several months of me stealing time from the real job to work on the game meant sooner or later karma would come full circle and they’d want that time back. Well they took it and now I’d say we’re even.

Anyway, while on the road, working on the art for the game was simply not possible. But I did get many hours of writing in while mid-flight and waiting around airport coffee shops. So while the month wasn’t a total loss (I got about three chapters written!), the part of the job that needs to get done to get a release ready was on hold. But I’m back now and it’s time to fix that. With so much content ready in the wings, I can focus solely on art production.

I’ve spent this week putting everything back in order, catching up on emails and sorting things out around the house. But come Monday I’ll be ready to jump right back into this thing and start hammering away in Daz. Right now my goal is snap off three live streams a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday for 3 to 4 hours each. That should get us a solid 12 to 15 hours of art a week for the next couple of weeks if we can maintain. Naturally I want to do more, but I have to wait and see how the scheduling with the real job works out. But 3 days a week, 3 to 4 hours a day is the bare minimum I’m aiming for. Hopefully we’ll get in more.

So for those that hung in there with me despite my unacceptable lack of communication, I thank you tremendously. The game is not “aboned” and I’m as passionate as ever. I was obviously unable to work on the art (which is the part that desperately needs completed), but I did have the game on my mind the whole time and put down just over 30,000 fresh words into the script. At this point I have to take whatever wins I can.

I guess that’s all I got for now. We’ll talk soon and I’ll see you Monday for a fresh art live stream! After all, we have Emily and Jane both waiting for chapter completion! I dare not keep them waiting any longer.

Again, thank you for your continued support and I look forward to working with you again soon!

2021-07-20 Been a hot minute and a busy month, so I figure it's time to catch everyone up.

What's there to say. Working, working, and then working some more.

Time spent on the game slowed down a bit for the last week and a half. The real job blues hit hard and I career demands stole a bunch of that time. Summer is a busy month and I'd been putting it off for as long as I could. But it was finally time to produce some real results or I was going to be up against the wall.

Render machines are up a running, images are being kicked out, and I need to get on some post production so I can get some play test material rolling through the doors.

I'm not going to get as much released this month as I'd hoped cause the real job back doored me. But I'm going to do my best to get at least one of these chapters buttoned up real quick with others to follow close behind.

We're half way done with Emily, Lupita and have an early start on Jane. And there is a the Nanami rework happening. So there's a lot going on. Little by little we'll get it jammed out.

In the meantime, I've got Sarah to help coach me and cool me down. Deep breathes right. We'll get it all done. Looking to stream 5 days this week and next to try and jam out as much as we can at the end of the month.

Oh, and another upside, I got to start working on Sarah's first scene today. With that we'll have two new love interests introduced in Emily's chapter. Should be fun times. Salute!

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!