Just a small update on how production is going :)

Hello everyone,

Just a small update on how production is going :)

Our heroes' company is planning a trip to a countryside retreat to spend a long weekend together...

...And learn to live together in "new" relationships...

I expect the next update to be out in a couple of weeks, exclusively here for patrons and only in English. The following update is planned to be released simultaneously with the summer sale on Steam (June 28). This update will include the latest part and the next one that will be completed by then, available in all languages.

In general, the work is now progressing more steadily and calmly. I spent some time adding the Portuguese language to test how Steam's algorithms work and to see how such updates impact sales/show volumes.

In secret, I'll admit that it had almost no effect... well, to be precise, nothing significant changed. But, in a way, at this stage, maintaining the sales level is an achievement in itself, as a decrease in game exposure is expected and normal behavior on Steam over time.

Let me share some of the development challenges.

For instance, the quality and duration of animations are currently heavily limited by the poorly chosen hair models for the heroines.

You might not have noticed, but in most similar VNs, heroines' hair isn't longer than their shoulders.

This is because managing long hair in Daz3D is a huge problem; it's impossible to make long hair behave naturally without using dForce (a physics simulation). However, using dForce makes it impossible to loop animations, as hair never returns to its original position in the last frame. Hence, if you attempt to loop it, the hair will always "jump" when transitioning from the last frame to the first.

I chose such models for an understandable reason – zero experience at the game's start.

In the next game, I will exclusively use character models based on Genesis 9 and hairstyles for them. They're not perfect, but they behave much better, allowing for more dynamic and complex animations. By that time, I also hope to receive enough Steam payouts to upgrade my PC, making animations much easier and faster to create. I'm eagerly awaiting the release of the Nvidia GeForce 5090 :) 3080 is a good graphics card, but 10GB of memory is TRAGICALLY insufficient for comfortable and fast work in Daz3D.

A bit more about hair (sorry, a sore point). Chloe's hair uses monstrously large textures and is very complex in structure.

Therefore, each scene with Chloe (each frame/render) is over 150 megabytes. By comparison, without her, a similar scene with a couple of characters takes up only 3 megabytes :) Currently, Chloe has relatively little participation in the game (since developing relationships with her is, in a sense, a key point and determining moment of the game). Scenes with her occupy some 10 gigabytes. But closer to the end of the game... I might have to increase the SSD size (currently 1 terabyte). For you, the game is about 5 gigabytes, but all my libraries, scenes, renders, and other working aspects now take up 500 gigabytes or more.

That's the situation... Alright, I'll get back to work. Renders won't render themselves.