Developer Diary #1 - Recounting Episode 2's development!

Hi all! I hope everyone is doing well as we enter the middle of the week!

As discussed in the previous dev log, I have been meaning to do a retrospective of Episode 2 and the things I've picked up on during its development. I will temporarily dub them as a Developer Diary, so it can be easily identified and skipped should it not be your cup of tea!

Now, with that out of the way, let's begin!

A bumpy start
When Episode 2 development kicked off, it was quite a rollercoaster during June, July, and August 2023. In a span of these three months, I had a lot of personal issues stacked up one on top of the other, with an attempted home invasion giving me some levels of paranoia for those few months as well as the passing of one of my family members. To say it was a torrential thunderstorm would be an understatement, as my mental state was bouncing between gloomy and small bouts of panic. It was not a pleasant development phase, to put it simply!

While I found some solace in the development of Cara in Creekmaw, I would be lying if I said it didn't affect the overall development pace of Episode 2, as it truly was so difficult to feel motivated with so many things happening around me. Even though Episode 2 did eventually make its way out of the development cycle, I can't help but feel some things could have been better if I just focused myself, but of course, there's no use crying over spilled milk!

A hasty finish
Those three months came around to bite me in the ass as during the November/December 2023 period, I was in a state of constant rush and crunch, putting things together as they are coming hot off the rendering presses. This was all while I was dealing with the exit process of my full-time job (which I'm thankful to be free from now), and a few real-life events that I could not avoid, as well as the overseas trip near the 2nd half of December.

Looking back, I would say I'm a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. Disbelief in that I can't believe I managed to eke out Episode 2 in an almost fully playable state, while the disappointment is how I did not give myself ample time to properly test the game for bugs (of which there were many!). Of course, these things will not happen again and I will be ensuring the bug-testing is done at a much earlier stage!

Things I learned along the way
There were many things that I came to realize process-wise and development-wise, but I believe this section can be summed up with these few key points!

Time management
This is of course the biggest takeaway and a lesson to be taken seriously, with me going into full-time development of Cara in Creekmaw! While my workload is freed up from leaving my full-time job last year, I should start to plan and execute tasks that will help to quicken the next content update and hit my set milestones throughout 2024!

Set accurate expectations and release dates!
While Episode 2 did come out as targeted, it definitely could have done with a few weeks in the oven to smooth out certain aspects and a few gameplay elements!

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and the release date of Episode 2 had to be either the middle of December 2023 or January 2024 as I would be away during the last two weeks of December. In the end, I went with the former as I did not want to disappoint all of you who have waited patiently for its release!

In a sense, it is my fault for planning a release on a month when I knew well in advance that I would be away a few days after it was released to everyone. Better planning should have been at the forefront of my mind and it unfortunately slipped through the gaps as I battled to get everything in place!

Of course, this doesn't mean I will needlessly delay releases or updates in the future. I will continually refine my processes and development speed and will always look to share content updates in a timely fashion, although I will be less likely to lock down specific dates (and put unnecessary pressure on myself) but instead, look to a release window of a week (i.e. 24th to 31st January instead of designating 27th January as a de-facto release date).

Vore process refinement (spoiler warning + slightly technical!)
While most renders from vore scenes usually require a small amount of post-work and touchups, one scene in particular required extra care due to some hiccups with the 3D model itself. Even though this is mainly a workaround, I would be curious to see how this would work for other vore scenes in the future!

This scene in question is the Noodles/Suyin oral vore scene, being the first (and not the last!) vore scene involving a python! While the scene involving Tabatha/Suyin treaded on familiar ground (i.e. quadrupedal animal similar to Gallo), Noodles/Suyin had a different problem altogether.

Goal: I want the bulges of Suyin to appear as realistically as possible inside Noodles.
Problem: Noodles' eyes would go like this...

Of course, the initial solution was to just make the bulge less realistic (which would alleviate the problem of the "strange eyes"). Another problem is the missing mouth texture of Noodles, but when that is added...

In the end, the problems were two-fold:
1. A realistic bulge would cause the eyes to appear weird and the pink poke-through would be very noticeable.
2. To have the mouth and the eyes appear normal, the bulge would have to look less realistic.

A cyclic problem, in a sense, where I can't have the results I'm looking for without sacrificing the other. Of course, this is where a little post-work magic comes into play, allowing for what I want without fiddling too much with the software itself and leaving myself to the mercy of the computations!

So, by combining the refined bulge of Noodles in the first image together with his head and mouth in the second image, we get the following result!

Voilà! All solved! And looking good in the process, too!

In summary, every shot you see in this scene is the result of each view having two renders which combined into the final shot you see above!

On the face of it, this is simple post-work and is nothing too complicated, but before this, I tended to stray away from doing any major post-work and usually relied on the render coming out as cleanly as possible. However, after learning and seeing the results of post-work on scenes like this, I would be a fool to not include a healthy amount of post-work to vore scenes moving forward!

Conclusion
If you made it here, I'm thankful for your kind attention and for taking the time to read through all of the details above!

I believe that writing out these self-reflections can only help me to further acknowledge the good and bad parts of every content update, and allow me to filter out the bad parts early on while maintaining and keeping up on the things that will make Cara in Creekmaw better and better!

Thank you all for the support as always and I'll catch you for the next instalment of Developer Diary!