Harmony Girls v0.3 Development Update #2

It's been an interesting week for Harmony Girls. Progress on the next update is going well, with a lot of renders now finished and more on the way. I'm retroactively going back and changing some things in v0.2.8 as well, which I'll talk about in a bit. But for now, let's talk a bit about what to expect in the next update.

I've finished 5 animations so far, with possibly double that planned for the next release. As you can see from the teaser, Jamie has a kink of her own. Expect a good amount of foot related content from Jamie & Zoey in the future. My plan is for each girl to have their own kink, and to have a nice diverse set of kinks that has something for everyone. This is also Jamie & Zoey's topless lingerie set, with nude, topless, and full lingerie being the 3 outfit sets available for them. I won't be able to let you mix and match the sets between the two of them, because that adds exponentially more renders, but this should allow a decent amount of customization.

Now onto some changes for v0.2.8 that I've been doing. Unfortunately, I ran into a problem with performance issues which I didn't realize I was setting myself up for. Harmony Girls needs to cache the animations used in videos so there's no loading when using actions. I won't go into the details here, but Ren'Py requires a shockingly large amount of VRAM/RAM when caching images. This led to Harmony Girls eating up nearly 7GB of memory for Claire's video making. I've optimized that a little bit, but I had to add some quality settings which reduces the number of frames in each animation. If you haven't had an issues at this point, you won't have to worry about it and can use the high quality preset. If you had unexpected game crashes or display bugs that aren't related to gameplay bugs, then you may need to lower the quality setting. This only affects the minigame, and the full quality animations are still viewable in the gallery. Scene animations are unaffected as well, though I did make some changes to reduce memory consumption with those.

On a more positive note, I've been experimenting with rendering still frames during animation breaks in the third Claire Collab. I don't want to use character portraits during sexy scenes when characters are just talking. During normal dialogue, I think character portraits are perfectly acceptable so I can focus my efforts elsewhere. Going forward, expect more still frames during breaks in the action. These won't reduce the number of animations I make, but they'll add visual elements to things like insertion which I previously used with character portraits or just described during the animation.

That's a large enough wall of text for today. If you want to know more about the memory issues, I talked about it in detail in the discord. Thanks for supporting development, see you next time!

Also, probably going to change the wall color for Jamie's room to be grey, because the white is hard on the eyes.