Tropecita Games

v.0.21 Progress Report (I)

Added 2024-09-08 11:45:43 +0000 UTC

Hello once again, I'm here with news about the first 5 days of development for the next update.

It's been a bad week for development. The first scene in the update is heavily animated and also hard to animate because there aren't any commercial animations that fit the scene's needs.

So what have I done? I changed my usual work pipeline ("write, then render") to "render the animations, be sure they look good, and then write the scene". It didn't make sense to write a part of the scene and then not being able to render it with the minimum quality I want.

That made the week look weird when I added up everything I did. I only did animations, and the next week will be similar, because I'm only halfway through the first scene's animations. Eleven animations are finished, I'm rendering the first test of the 12th while I write this post, and there are 1,549 definitive frames. Only one of the animations is fully commercial (with adjustments), the rest of them are done from scratch (4) or a mix and match of commercial animations with my own additions (6). It's possible the scene ends up with over 20 animations and that's a lot of test-rendering (the commercial animation was rendered 6 times, 2,460 renders in total, only 410 usable, to get the adjustments right).

So I didn't write a word this week, and that hurts. I feel more like a storyteller than a renderer, and not writing anything is weird. The good thing about it is that, once the animations are finished, I can write a lot without stopping to render anything, beyond the still images that will link the animations into a cohesive scene.

And that's all that I have to say this time. Next week there is a bank holiday day (National Day of Catalonia) and I will take advantage of it to advance the animation part, so I hope to finish the whole animation for that scene before next weekend.

Meanwhile, if you haven't, you can enjoy 0.20, which will arrive to Emma, Daphne, and Erika's Tiers before the next progress report.

And the next Special Renders: Vehicles edition, two of them scheduled for next week.