It's the "Shall we play a game?" update...

Hello!

A bit of a long update on where we are on the chapter and more generally.

Chapter 5 overview

Well it feels more or less there. The main script is all done, coding too and all the still images have been whomped up as well as some of the animations too. Given that, at the same time, I've been completely refreshing the GUI and the players game mechanics (so pulling the game apart and putting it together again) that doesn't feel too shabby to me. Your mileage may vary of course.

Parts of the game have started to slip out for testing and the feedback from that is good with positive notes in respect of the script and refreshed visuals (I've got better at rendering and animating it seems).

On the refreshed GUI I've been adding a few other unplanned tweaks as well, most of them subtle but all quite nice or useful from the player perspective. So, for example, if you play VR you'll find the little character talk boxes now change to Gloria and Babe/Bobe as opposed to staying as Sarah and the MC. It's a little touch but just adds some polish as well as underlining what happens in VR isn't happening to the MC or Sarah themselves.

Animating

On animating more generally, I've also found time to get to basic grips with post work software and have managed to make the animations both smoother and less "blocky". One of my bête noires with Daz is that you can make an animation comprising several hundred (or thousand!) frames and each still looks fine - until you run it as animation, and then the movement introduces a form of blocky grain. I seem to have now been able to remove this via getting to grips with Adobe After Effects. Still a lot to learn on it yet but at least things will start to look better and that can only be an upwards and positive curve all round.

Strip Poker

I want to talk about this one by itself for a bit as I'm jolly pleased with it. So in Five we have a strip poker game with Chris but whereas in my last update I was still unhappy with it that is no longer the case. Far from it. Over 10,000 lines of code to get this to work in the end (so coding wise bigger than Chapters One and Two together...) but by crikey it's pretty decent. Fully animated too of course.

She plays well. Very well. As a dev sometimes you wrap your more complex pieces up in cotton wool for a while, being grateful that they work at all and loathe to push them to far but with this one I threw caution to the wind and we had an impromptu live test of Chris vs a group of people who were on discord at the time.

She kicked our collective backsides. Now the fact that she won in itself isn't that important. She was lucky at times for example, but what is important is that it felt right. She'd bluff at times, or lure the player in to raise stakes when she had a killer hand, or fold if the player was aggressive and her own hand was weak and generally she played as you'd expect a smart poker player to play. And it was that "feels right" that I'd been struggling with for a while. 

In fact it's so good it seems a pity to have it as a one-off in game. I'm warm to the idea that when the hardware is idle because I'm writing etc to re-use it for some non-canon variations. Almost have a H5 strip poker side game with all the girls in a variety of settings. Annie in a nightclub or Sarah in a western saloon etc etc. Do the whole crowd and give them different playing styles. But that's a side project of course. The engine is a bit slow at times at the moment (well, you're not actually be able to make Renpy do a poker game, so to be expected I suppose) but I have a few tricks up my sleeve that I can apply to nerf that.

What's left to do?

Five things are outstanding before release.

Caverns I haven't yet touched. (The poker did eat up a lot of time.) On the other hand Caverns tends to be the easiest module to do as the script and coding are generally easy and it's not very demanding render wise either in terms of number of renders or complexity. So although I'd prefer it done, I'm not terribly worried about it at this stage. I'd be more concerned if it was any other module.

The tactical combat module I'm still not happy with AI wise. Graphically and mechanically it looks fine but the gameplay balance is still way off. Unlike poker which "feels right" this still feels wrong and the gameplay is so unbalanced even winning doesn't feel fun. But, given it's a similar problem to the one I had on poker I'm confident I can resolve this.

Bored Pilot. I need to poll you on this for the main interview although the surrounding articles are all done.

Testing. This is ongoing.

Animations. This is the critical path and where we run the real risk of delay. A fair chunk of them are done and all the rest are set up but I'll be honest in that I expected the 3090 to be on stream by now and I still don't have one. Partly it's down to the pricing, which for what I want seems to be going up rather than down, and partly due to availability. There are some pre-built machines out there that I could get but the infrastructure supporting the card (ie the rest of the PC) seems too weak for what I need in terms of constant running. Some of you may remember my excitement at getting a shiny new 2080 a while back ago - and how the motherboard burned out after a couple of months. So, given I'm going to be dropping over $5,500 of your money on the beastie I don't want to make a mistake and get something knack. It'd be a hell of an expensive error.

Other non critical tweaks

Two things I'm still considering.  The first is the moving of Becca off "front of house". So no more chatty tutorials or results. The new achievement system works much better than her old chat about paths and so that takes way half of why she existed in the first place. 

I'm also casting my eye over the evening modules a bit. I think one thing that would really extend the players game time is to make those modules less exclusive. There is a lot of choice in H5 already. Restricting the player to spending time on an evening with either, say, Sarah or Annie etc to the exclusion of the others is perhaps not only not required but is also really just frustrating the player as they have to boot up multiple saves.

Summary.

So five months in and it's not too bad. Not great, but not bad either. The GUI refresh and the poker together probably soaked up a month and with half the animations in the can, looking at the bigger picture, the only thing now stopping me from kicking out three chapters a year in the way I want to have them look is the 3090 and that is just a matter of weeks and luck. 

But, bar a small miracle of suddenly getting a machine in the next 48 hours and everything going right first time, it does look like I'll slip into April which I'm sorry about. I could cut some animations of course but we're talking about principle characters lewd scenes here and to trim those would seem a bit silly really at this stage (besides they looked like jolly decent animations in draft so...y'know.)

And finally...

I've cleared all my mail and messages! My apologies to those of you who have had to wait so long in some cases.

Stay, or be, lucky.

Notty