1 Year, Leap of Faith

Open post for everybody today.

One year ago to this day, I was sitting in front of my computer feeling nauseous. As I was hovering my mouse button over the "Publish" button, I was also working my way through about a hundred reasons why I should postpone it until later.

In the end though, I did click, and it's pretty much been a fun ride since then.

So to celebrate this day, for myself if nothing else, here's a few 'did you knows', which you might... well... not know.

Did you know...

• LoF was released on the 26th of March last year, but the first render I did dates back to January 12th. It was this one (displaying my complete lack of clothing assets, and not even noticing the enormous clippings).

• the first character I made was Cece. She looks exactly as she does today, but her wardrobe was added later. The second was Kira. This is what she looked like in an early test render.

• the first ever full screen HD render I did was meant to be a test of how long
  renders took to make. It took 6 hours to complete, and is actually in the story today (the MC waking up in chapter 1). It took me about 4 hours to pose... we all got to start somewhere.
  
• Stephanie was also different initially, before she got her final version.

• Leap of Faith was written in the summer of 2019, which is more than a year before I discovered VNs. In other words, it's not based on - or having copied anything from - any existing VN.
  
• I didn't get any patreons on the first day of release, but I got my first 7 on the second day. Amazingly enough, 5 of them are still a patreon and has been for the whole year.
  
• If you became a patreon before the 1st of April last year, you could download a special - early joiner render - of Cece and Lexi doing a bit of exploring. It's not available anywhere now.
  
• making a VN requires a lot of rendering. I've made a total of 37,301 renders since starting this project, which averages to one render every 18 minutes for the full 14 months - night and day, 7 days a week.
  
• the same Nvidia 2060 graphics card has been rendering the whole story of Leap of Faith (minus the first 10 images, which was done on a 1060/3gb).
  
• LoF's script consists of 50,000 lines of dialogue and scripting. That averages to over 100 lines added each day (that sounded way better in my head to be honest. Anyway, moving on...).
  
• I've received a lot of praise for the visuals in LoF, which is kind of weird as I'm using a much heavyer image compression (80% jpg) compared to everyone else. If I hadn't, LoF would have been close to 10GB in size. The final chapter Steam version will most likely use less compressed versions of the original renders.
  
• ...for a while I considered changing the name to 'Cause and Effect' to reflect on the choice system most Visual Novels base themselves on, but in the end went with the original name (original concept art below).

• I'm already writing my next story while working on LoF. Project name: 'Euphoria'.
  
• Leap of Faith is not even close to breaking even financially. But with the help from you guys, the monthly costs are much more manageable than they were in the early stages. When I say you help me make a better game, I'm dead serious. Because you do. Thank you!
  
• if this was a normal weekly report, it would have said that I'm at 1,175 story renders and 10,901 animated frames completed for Chapter 5.
  
• that the release date video for Chapter 5 will be out later today?

And with that I wish you all a good weekend. Stay safe out there.

Cheers