Development Update: August 2020


Hello all,

I'm going to reduce the public development updates to once a month, I will still keep posting updates for supporters and those on my discord. This will allow me to have a bit more to talk about rather than just "did more renders". And perhaps make these updates more interesting to you.

Speaking of Discord, it is free for anyone to join even if you are not a supporter: LINK

So the poll for Kimiko's hair colour has nearly ended, it's still very close between the Ash and Flame look. There's 3 days left for voting!

In the last developer log (#5) I stated I would talk more about where I am in progress for Chapter Two. I will also try to give an idea of when I hope to release.

Firstly, I feel a need to temper expectations you may have. I am a lone developer on Dreams of Reality and although all of my free time is spent on the game, either developing, writing code, scripting, or the creation of scenes for rendering, I do have a full-time job. As such, even though I want to get the updates out as quick as possible, the above is a limitation that I cannot ignore.
However, progress is ongoing, the script itself has been written, and part of my process is to import each 'scene' into the code base, edit as required, then work through creating, rendering and adding the images.

I'm also creating animations. So far there are 13 separate animations for a total of 79 seconds. Since I made the decision to render at 60 fps, that's a total of (60 x 79=) 4740 images rendered so far. I have one more scene that will have some animations, but the remainder are static.
This leads me onto the static images - so far there are 357 scenes. I have not included any bonus scenes, or UI images in that total. This is covered by 13965 words of dialogue added to the game.

I intended to split Chapter two into two or more parts, given the amount of work already put into the current part it feels like a full chapter in itself. Chapter one had in total 26765 words of dialogue, so from this you could say that I'm just over the halfway mark in comparison.

I'm actually a little further ahead, as I have scenes rendering, and around 2500 words that I've added to the game code today. I suspect Chapter two: Part one will come in at around the same level of content as the first chapter, however, due to branching storylines, some aspects you will not see until a second playthrough.

So, when do I think I'll be getting this update out? Honestly, it's hard to give a firm ETA at this point. There are some elements I want to change but I'm currently working on releasing in two months. This doesn't give me much time for testing, something you may or may not have noticed, the first chapter had little to no bugs. This is in no small part to the amazing beta testers, and my proof reader.

All credit should go to them, but if I have to delay a release to give the update some corrective polishing - I will.

Okay, quite a dry one this time, I thank all the supporters that have joined. My plan is to save the money you have given and work towards getting a dedicated rendering rig - this will have a massive impact on my update cycle (effectively cutting it by half), but I'm a ways off from that for now. I think with  a second update released, I might entice others to support which will push me towards this goal.

Stay safe.

Cenc