I have made 0 progress on new content this week. Dealing with the achievement stuff hogged all my time.

For a moment I really thought I could do without it, but almost immediately after my previous dev update, some of you raised their voices and taught me otherwise. Apparently, achievements are beyond important to Steam players. Important enough to motivate a purchase. It wasn't an option.

So I spent the week working on that. And it took me way more time than I expected. The code problem was easy to fix and the refactoring didn't take more than a few hours, but the icons.... God, it took me three days to produce the two hundred icons needed for the achievement list. It was simple enough though. Find the achievement, make sure I know what it's about, find or craft a usable icon somewhere on the web, and process it with the right color scheme. 10 to 15 minutes per achievement, three days of work. I finished that yesterday and spent two-thirds of today processing the achievement list into Steam. Guess what: the achievement manager seems to have been made in the nineties and is its own form of punishment. But I made it through. Once I was done with it, I managed to make a proper build for Steam and tested it... And it worked.

So... I have made zero progress on the new content this week, but Summer Scent's store page and build have been sent for review.

Steam promised a response in 3 to 5 days. Needless to say, I am terrified and impatient.

I'll be back to writing scene 29 on Monday.

You can follow my progress on this Trello board.

Thank you for your support!

The Naughty Captain

I'm done with posing Scene 28.

I have yet to finish rendering it. Pc Chan will take care of it in the coming nights. I have started writing scene 29 but haven't progressed much on that front. I barely collected my notes and drafted a plan of the scene. I wrote about 300 real words of a first draft so far, which isn't really impressive. I dropped that task momentarily to work on something else: the Steam store page.

I received the teaser! And in my opinion, it's amazing. The storytelling is great, the music is on point, and the ambiance is perfect. I like it.

As a consequence, I pushed on the Steam page and tried to complete it in order to submit the whole thing to Steam today. I failed, however. I finally had to rerender my title screen with a slightly different angle to make room for the logo. All the capsules are now ready, all the texts have been written and all questionnaires have been answered. The store page is essentially ready.

And I thought that the build was ready too when I realized that I had to do something about the achievements. A bit of code, and ... about a hundred different icons to produce. I can probably publish the game without the achievements but I'm afraid that it might cause some issues on the build I will submit to Steam. So I want to deal with it once and for all now. But this brings a lot of questions. As a part of the content will be reworked, the achievements may change (most likely in names and titles only) and I don't know how tolerant Steam is to that kind of changes.

There is an easy solution to that issue. I can neutralize all the achievements that are susceptible to change and reintroduce them as I rework the content. That means no more achievements from Day 2 to 5.

I don't know. I have to think about it during the weekend and make a decision before I start working on it on Monday.

You can follow my progress on this Trello board.

Thank you for your support!

The Naughty Captain

Not much to say.

My house is still a mess and A/C isn't fully installed yet. I've been promised it will be ready next Monday. Temperatures are rising as we step into Summer and I'm still living in a scorching hell. Fingers crossed there will be no more delay because we have already stepped into the too-hot-for-rendering territory.

I've progressed a bit on the posing. I've reached shot #129. I hope to be able to finish the posing next week. Unless I come up with a stupid idea, I'm done with all the "difficult" poses. I'm still losing time with simulations, but I've learned to live with it. At the moment I have three characters to simulate every time they move ever so slightly. The simulations usually go smoothly, but it's still about 10 minutes I spend waiting behind my screen. It's not a great feeling. Anyway, I'm progressing.

The steam process is on pause for now. I'm waiting on that mandatory teaser. I've contracted a video editor on Fiverr. The gentlemen seem to have some experience with trailers for AVNs. There again, fingers crossed. I should have taken care of that weeks ago, as soon as I pressed the steam button. But I didn't. I was too focused on getting "The perfect text". It was stupid.

You can follow my progress on this Trello board.

Thank you for your support!

The Naughty Captain

Meager progress this week.

For the last two days, I had some work done on my house and couldn't progress much. And it's not going to get any better as it will happen again next week. However, that also means that I'll soon get A/C installed. At that point you probably all know that I have a heat problem during summer that regularly prevents me from rendering. Fingers crossed that the A/C will help mitigate the issue by bringing down the temperature of my house and my office. With a bit of luck, I might be able to render something this summer!

So, I've pretty much lost two days this week. I've barely posed 30 shots, which isn't much. I started rendering. So far the results are satisfying. I like the light I have in that living room.

The Steam page still isn't ready. All the required texts have been written, and I still have to work on the capsules. However, what's holding me back now is the trailer. I should have taken care of this sooner. Likes weeks ago. I don't know how I managed to forget about it. A trailer is kind of mandatory, and it's way out of my area of expertise. I'm currently talking with a freelance video editor to get something done. I have good hopes to have something to show you very soon.

You can follow my progress on this Trello board.

Thank you for your support!

The Naughty Captain

Day 6 Scene 28.

Some progress on the posing. I've posed 59 shots over the 180 planned, so a third of the scene is ready to be rendered. The previews look good so far. I will start rendering this weekend.

I wrote all the necessary content for the store page. And I'm not satisfied. I feel like it's not descriptive enough, not enticing enough. Of course, that isn't an objective point of view. There are some things I need to correct but most of the issue here is about me. Because I'll never be satisfied, especially when it comes to something that important. Over the years, I made a lot of progress in letting go of the idea of perfection and going with the "good enough" instead. This is just harder than usual because it's about something rather important.

I'm not even sure that most of this content is that important anyway.

I have no doubt that the core description of the game is critical, but what about the "early access" part? When you buy a game on Steam, how many of you, and how often do you read the "early access" part of a store page? 

I need to produce some dedicated art for the capsules. The image I use doesn't fit nicely in all the required sizes. I'm not sure I'll be able to fit the three girls in there. I will have to choose one. Eve, being the most popular love interest, would be the logical choice.

And I just realized that I need a video to use as an introduction. I'm gonna have to contract someone for that as I have absolutely no idea how to do that.

You can follow my progress on this Trello board.

Thank you for your support!

The Naughty Captain

The week was pretty poor productively speaking.

I started posing the scene but as you can see on the Trello board, I didn't progress much. As always, the first shot of a sequence takes quite some time to pose. It's about initializing the starting conditions of a whole series of images. You have to place and fully pose every character, set up the props, check the lights... These are the foundations upon which the entire set rests. Given the extensive loading times I have to deal with, I really don't want to make a mistake there.

You can also note that I spent some time on "additional material". Scene 28 starts with the team watching TV and I needed something to display on the screen. I had to decide on a very simple story fitting my needs, create a couple of characters and environments, and pose a handful of shots. It took quite some time for just 4 shots but I don't really have a choice. I don't want to use "external material" anymore and I need the screen to tell a precise story as it will play a role in the discussion.

I now have all the material I need for the next 80 shots or so. I should be able to progress faster.

I really underestimated the work required to properly set up a store page on Steam. There are many images and text to produce. I thought about producing some new and specific artwork for what Steam names "capsules" (Basically: the banners and the buttons.) but I will finally use the title screen I use at the moment. It works most of the time. It's a bit more complicated with vertical capsules but I think it works.

The real problem is in the text. At that point, I feel like I'm kind of decent when it's about writing fiction but I'm dogshit weak when it comes to promotional stuff and marketing language. There is a ton of text required and everything I wrote so far smells like complete and utter crap. And I'm supposed to seduce the eventual Steam player with that text. I'm doomed.

I hope to be done with both the store page and the initial build of the game and set everything for validation before the end of this month.

I have to confess that I am kind of terrified to make a mistake that would ruin everything. If Summer Scent isn't successful on Steam, things are going to get difficult for me very quickly.

You can follow my progress on this Trello board.

Thank you for your support!

The Naughty Captain