Project Update #4 - 16.09.2023

Heyo everybody.
Back with an update post for Rivencliff!

Unity & RenPy

After Unity's latest stunt enraging pretty much the entire indie dev scene, I have made the decision to ditch Unity and switch to RenPy. RenPy is a well-established game engine for Visual Novels and powers pretty much all the furry visual novels you can think of!

The conversion process was pretty seamless and only took a few hours. Resident Patrons can already enjoy new builds using RenPy via Steam.

Intro of Rivencliff

As you can see the post's image, production for the first scene of Rivencliff is done! Well, somewhat. I call it "80%-complete". So why only 80%?

In software development there is a rule that says "80% of the features are done in 20% of the time, and the remaining 20% are done in 80% of the time.". I could spend a lot of time polishing the poses, lighting, rendering, add sound effects, do this, do that, you catch my drift.

But I think it is in everyone's interest that the first revision I make of each scene is done in a bit less polished way so it can be completed a lot faster. After all, another saying says: "If you are not embarrassed by your first release, you released too late."

So, yeah, things are accelerating at the moment, which is great! I hope to get another 2 scenes done and then release the first build! Thanks for everyone who has been supported this project so far, I appreciate it a lot and seeing you guys here motivates me to push this a lot further!

In other News

A couple smaller updates I wanted to share:

• For the time being, videos are being replaced with static images. RenPy has very bad video playback performance and I have already raised this to the developers. Should this get improved, videos will be added back to Rivencliff.
• Ivon's design is complete and the 3D artist will start working on Ivon's model next week!
• I've spent some time evaluating SPXWLF's VRChat avatars, but I think I have come to the conclusion that at the moment it would be too much work to make them work with my current production pipeline. They are great models, but given their nature as VRChat avatars, not optimized in a few ways I would need them, but that's on me!
• I will start production planning for Scene 2 tomorrow and source & setup the interior scene of Buru's house. I hope Scene 2 will be as fast, if not faster, than Scene 1 to produce.

I wish you guys a great weekend!

- Buru