PANDORIUM STYLE

Hi everyone! I hope you’re all doing well!

I apologize for the delay. I wanted to write this post much earlier, but with everyone in my family, myself included, having birthdays this month, I haven’t been able to find the time to sit down and properly write this update.

After testing several different systems in search of the right balance between optimizing the game itself, the characters, and the environment, consulting with our elders, and examining several projects with themes similar to ours, I’ve decided that the best approach would be to create the Pandorium remake in a 2D style. First and foremost, a 2D style will offer greater possibilities for cross-platform support, while also allowing us to create a much larger and more diverse amount of content without risking excessive disk space usage or video memory consumption.

With a large amount of varied content in 3D, we would eventually run into the challenge of balancing disk space requirements with graphical performance. Unfortunately, achieving both a high level of variety and good optimization would become increasingly difficult.

Of course, 2D also has its limitations. It offers less flexibility when it comes to character interaction, camera angles, camera work, and many other aspects. However, it gives us much more freedom to experiment with character appearances and create a greater variety of unique-looking characters.

If we want to create hundreds of characters with different, distinctive appearances, doing so in 2D would require considerably less disk space and processing resources than doing so in 3D. A single 3D character can easily take up more than 200 MB, especially when it contains a large amount of data. Alternatively, we might have dozens of different characters, each taking up around 50-60 MB.

On top of that, the animations for these characters can also require a significant amount of storage. If we have hundreds of characters with their own unique animations especially if they include mutants or aliens the total amount of data can become enormous.

In other words, the game could end up requiring several hundred gigabytes of storage, which I believe could become somewhat problematic. Performance would also be more demanding in such a case.

I’ve examined many 3D projects and noticed significant performance challenges. Creating adult content requires a somewhat different approach to character models than what is typically needed in standard games. It requires a large number of morphs, high-quality physics, detailed animations, and more. All of this comes at a considerable cost in terms of performance, as well as the amount of space required on the hard drive.

In a 2D world, we can approach these challenges much more simply. Characters can be more unique and, as my friend put it, they can have more soul than 3D characters.

That is another reason why I’m choosing 2D at this point: to avoid the uncanny valley effect, where characters can end up looking somewhat unnatural. Achieving truly natural, high-quality animation in 3D can be extremely demanding and require a substantial amount of disk space.

Perhaps this decision won’t appeal to everyone, but I believe that remaking Pandorium in a more natural 2D style, similar to what we had in the original version, would be the right choice.

I’ve also had an idea that I think could be a great way to involve you in the development process: livestreaming certain parts of the work, such as the character we all voted on, a particular scene, an environment, and so on.

With AI becoming so popular these days, I have to admit that I’m not particularly supportive of relying on it for this kind of creative work. I feel that AI-generated images can often look rather generic and repetitive, and that something of the soul and atmosphere can get lost in the process.

That’s why I think it would be more interesting to show how the content is actually created, live and in real time. If there’s anyone interested in watching the process, I’ll announce upcoming livestreams in advance on our Discord channel and here on Patreon. You’re more than welcome to join and take part in the creative process.

I’ve already made the corresponding changes to the Patreon roles and rewards. A dedicated channel for livestreams will also be available on our Discord server soon.

I’ll also periodically run polls to let you decide which characters we should focus on and develop further.

I think this could be a great way to create more interesting and unique content together perhaps even more distinctive than what we could achieve with 3D. I think that covers everything I wanted to say for now. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions in the comments. Let’s discuss this topic together!

I’m always open to discussion and look forward to hearing from you.