Development Blog - March 25

Hello all!

Time for a monthly update.

I’m just going to get the bad news out of the way first. It finally happened. The game is catching up with me. My god I wish it wasn’t. I wish I could have enough content ahead of me that I could keep giving you guys consistent updates. But unfortunately, between having to work a full-time job, having a family and having a home to maintain, I just don’t get enough time for that. I suppose a stupid naïve part of me was really hoping that I would be earning enough to jack the job in and focus solely on Origin Story by now. But I’m afraid that is not the case. Not even close.

I keep trying to remind myself that there’s not many devs who do it like I do and only start working on their next chapter after they’ve released the previous one. Still, I can’t help but shake that fear that I’m going to disappoint my community by eventually falling into that same pattern that those other devs follow.

So, I now found myself in a position where I have two options.

Option 1 is I still release Chapter 7 in April, as per my estimation with the usual 3-month window between releases. I’m far enough into Chapter 8 that I may well still be able to release that 3 months later. The trouble is, with this option, I’m absolutely going to fall behind after Chapter 8, and the break between releases will suddenly increase to 5-6 months.

Option 2 is I push the release to May. That will give me some breathing room to progress further on Chapter 8 and maybe even start Chapter 9. This will also mean going forward, the break between releases will extend even more and you might find releases coming out every 4/5 months instead of every 3.

Ultimately, while I only have a limited amount of time to work on this game, long breaks between releases are becoming more and more inevitable, and I want to delay that as long as I can.

So, I’m going to go with Option 2. I know that will suck for anyone who is expecting it in April, and I’m sorry. But I promise to work on Origin Story every minute that I can to keep the updates coming as frequently as possible. Though, not at the expense of my marriage – she gets lonely sometimes ya know?

Now, on to some good news. Thanks to the support you guys give me, and to a couple of successful months for Origin Story, I have invested in some things to help speed development along even further.

The least exciting one (but still exciting) is that I have acquired myself a graphics tablet. As you all know, my post-work process is very hands on. Now it’s going to be literally hands on. Whenever I post, particularly when I’m doing it in bulk, I develop some quite bad pains in my wrists and hands from all the repetitive stuff I’m doing with the mouse. Now, I can free myself of the mouse and physically draw all that manually painted light/shadows and detail, and with significantly less pain.

The more exciting one, is I now have a second rig purely for rendering. Previously, I was unable to do anything that required an ounce of graphics card while my render queue was going, that includes post work. Now, I can pose scenes or do post-work to my hearts content, while the render rig pumps out the queue. And its faster than my main one too! Also, twice as much VRAM.. so that’s less scenes with multiple characters where I’m having to render the same scene two or three times and composite them together in photoshop.

Thanks to some advice from Tropecita Games (developer of My Dorm), the posing rig is sync’d to the render rig, so every scene I set up is immediately ready to be rendered on the other rig. I'm not super techie or anything, so to me it’s fucking dope. Though, we ‘re not going to talk about how Daz has made me want to punch stuff with its initial refusal to play nice and correctly read the asset library I sync’d over.

And to finish up, here’s a quick summary of upcoming chapters.

Chapter 7 fully done apart from one final lewd scene to write around already existing renders that I’ve been delaying because I didn’t want to do it too closely to the previous one that I recently finished . There's only so any sex scenes you can write before you get burnt out. All SFX are in and a whole bunch of new Creative Commons music are all in place along with a new “credits” menu where I can attribute them accordingly. I’m literally just waiting on finishing writing that last scene and then I’ll be ready to send it over to the testers.

Chapter 8 – 830 scenes rendered. Wait, make that 831.. my render rig just popped another one on my cloud storage as I typed (fucking dope).

That’s it for today.

As usual, thanks everyone for your support and patience. You guys are awesome.