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Bo-BOM! (giant animated red N comes up) Did you all enjoy Monday's announcement of the Netflix adaptation? As usual, my post was intended to be so ridiculously over-the-top that most people would get the joke immediately, but I still got a few people with it!
As most of you will have figured out, the promotional shots from the "show" were actually done with AI. I had to go through a number of permutations before I landed on ones I liked. Let's take a look at a few of those that didn't make the cut, just for fun, shall we?
I discovered the Microsoft stable diffusion tool when I made the Missy Funko Pops I posted on Discord a while back. For those of you not in the Discord (or who missed it,) these are they:
I goofed with Jess and forgot her ribbons, but you get the idea. So anyway, this then got me thinking that I could create more sophisticated gags with AI, and while making an April Fools post that I was changing the game to AI CG would have been too close to the 2022 gag, I could certainly use it for something else!
Anyway, the first thing I needed was my splash image. A few permutations were tried before I landed on the great shot of "April Fhurst" up at the top there. The hair is fine, the face needs some work and the uniform doesn't quite look right. Plus there's a bit of AI hands going on with that left hand. So I tried again.
Cute, shirt still wasn't great, and the pose didn't quite say splashy promo pic, but we were getting warmer. I probably would have gone with this one if it had got the hair right. That bad girl in the background looks a little more happy and friendly than she should, but I guess that plays into the joke of the tone being entirely changed to mainstream-friendly high school drama. Another near miss. Cute girl, acceptable hair and shirt, good background characters. But what is this pose? The decidedly AI-looking hand is just sort of up at the side like she's holding up an invisible tray. Sadly fails the uncanny valley test. This one again would have been great if Missy's hair was right. Sadly, it often randomly ignores prompts. How is that meant to be curled pigtails? And the pose wasn't quite right.
I also wanted a picture of Missy with Jess, but as people making AI CG games will tell you, it can be hard to make the character look the same in all the shots, so I had to abandon the idea after a few tries, since I couldn't get her looking the same as in the splash and Jess never looked right at all. Here's a few of the failures though. Jess looks more bored than grumpy here! Don't know why it gave Missy ribbons, and I'm not sure what Jess is doing to her here either! "God, Missy, you're such an embarrassment!" Probably my favourite, as it captures the girls' relative personalities the best. Pity about Missy's lazy eye. Also, for some reason it keeps insisting on giving Jess pigtails, and that's some pretty extreme AI hand on Missy there. Lastly, I had to show you this alternate one of the dance number. I almost used it, but I just thought having the two boys front and centre would be a bridge too far.
Well, now I've only got 363 days left to think of next year's so I'd better get my twisted mind working! See you next week when maybe I'll actually get back to talking about the game!
Jess would already be naked if Miss Paris had noticed her sat on that table. Hello all and welcome to this week's public update!
We're in that weird period between the supporter release and the public release, when it can be a little difficult to think of anything to really say, so today, I want to look back a little over the last year and talk about some of what I've learned doing this remaster, and how I intend to apply these lessons as we look ahead to 2023 and future releases.
2022 saw fewer releases than 2021 for one simple reason, and that was of course the remaster. However, the total time between 0.4 and 0.5 has ended up being 9 months, and that is far longer than I intended when I set out. It turns out that in doing this I unconsciously ran into a few issues that every developer encounters at some point.
When I started developing Missy, I had some experience with 3D modelling, but I think it's fair to say that those early renders were a bit basic. Over the last year, I'm very pleased with how well my skills have developed. This improvement has been compounded by the added resolution quality of moving to the new engine. To illustrate this point, let's just remind ourselves of how big the jump has been, with a side-by-side of, say, the play, which from 0.1 and was one of the last things to be remastered.
I posted the improved bow at the end of the play back in June, and it's already in the beta test versions that are publicly available, but here it is side-by-side with the old one. You don't have to look hard to see the improvement. The characters have unique and interesting posing rather than a uniform mono-pose that was just then copied for all 3, details like their hair and Missy's crown now obey the laws of gravity. The picture is zoomed in for greater clarity, the characters facial expressions suit the situation and the lighting is... well, the characters actually have shadows now for a start!
See, the thing is, I could go back and improve this again. The group study 3D map has been improved visually for 0.5, and I rendered this scene on the old one. I can see little details with the posing I'd like to improve. Are you starting to see the problem? It's possible to get into a never-ending upgrade cycle which prevents the project moving forward. Sooner or later, a dev has to accept that their time is better spent making new content. Learning this lesson was largely why the remaster took longer than expected, as I spent entire days overhauling existing scenes rather than just loading them up and re-rendering them at the new size.
The techniques that produce these improved renders take slightly longer to set up anyway as lighting must be calibrated and set, but I'm getting faster at this now. Separating image parts and rebuilding them back into composite pictures, a new technique to keep file size bloat to a minimum also adds time. This, like the quality improvements, ends up being a balancing act, which I've been figuring out during the development cycle of 0.5, which has also taken longer than its predecessors.
The upshot of all this is that there is certainly a place for improving old renders and making efficiency savings, but the time to be doing that is at points when development isn't ongoing, such as towards the end of a release cycle when the game is being tested, or alongside adding new content. I feel like this balance was a little off during this development cycle and will aim for a shorter lead time on 0.6.
The remaster was a project well worth undertaking, and that my supporters backed me by a huge margin then stuck with me during all that time is testament to that, but I am so glad it's over and to have finally delivered Chapter 4, which will be dropping for the public soon. I hope you're excited. My supporters have been singing its praises!
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