Progress Report #84 - Crunch, crunch never changes... (Patreon)

Hey lads!

First of all, I'm very sorry for the very late progress report. I got consumed by work so much that I didn't notice it's been almost 3 weeks since the last report, and it's less than 2 weeks until initial game release. I always overlook progress reports, sneakpeaks and so on while there's a lot of work, since my mind is fully focused on the work, and I really want to release the game still this month, so please bear with my lack of professionalism...

On the screenshots above you can see rough sketches of the unique characters (WIP). Also Jane's home in that order - Jane's Room, Ben's Room, Rick's Room, Rachel's Room (coming in the future), Empty Room (no flatmate), Kitchen. All locations in day & night variants. And finally some randomly generated characters sitting at the Kevin's Diner.

So after further playing with files, folders, quality settings, having majority of art set up and so on, I have bad news regarding game size. I won't be able to use Unity's file compression (main reason is using old Unity version which I can't do anything about), so final game will weight really a lot, like over 5 GB unpacked... But on the plus side, Android and .zip files (aka the files to download) will weigh under 1 GB, so you won't need a lot of bandwidth to download them. 

After some testing, it's gonna be bad on memory demand on both VRAM and RAM, so I'll probably have to downscale art resolution further in the end. While testing Windows version, currently game weighs 7 GB and it managed to eat up to 2,1 GB of RAM and 3,5 GB of VRAM, so having 4 GB of RAM and GPU RAM will be minimum to run the game at all, currently. Since I prefer that each one of you will be able to play the game, for the initial release I'll downscale art, and in the future I'll see what I can do with optimization, or just release another game version with HD art for people with more powerful machines. For Android, art will be further downscaled, obviously, due to the way these devices and their memory work. Don't worry, it won't be pixel hell, actually majority of character sneakpeaks that were presented to you are in downscaled resolution already, because working with low quality files is faster, as Unity lags less. So in other words, I wanted to give you much better art resolution than provided on screenshots above, but in the worst case, I "might" have to further downscale it. I mentioned it many times in the past, that the way the game is programmed I can't update the art and it has to stay bad forever, so to make it possible I had to do something very, very wrong and these are the effects... So yeah, you will need a lot of RAM & VRAM to run some 2D game. Sorry guys, but I couldn't find any other way to pull this off :/

Right now I'm mostly testing various stuff, fixing bugs, adding missing art files and re-making animations (really a lot of animations to do). From locations we are only missing the metro train, but we are still missing unique faces and some face/clothes parts (keep in mind that we decided to add more face variations due to the delay). I worked on multiple features along the way, too, but it was bad idea, as I should have concentrated on art/animation update only, but on the other hand I would probably burn-out pretty fast, if all I was doing for last few months was fixing art/animations. Anyway, I'll be disabling some of the new features for now, because they aren't ready and some cause problems, while I want as smooth release as possible. I also tried tweaking UI, but god damn it, I hate this shit and it consumes way more of my time than it should (I'm that bad at it). I had a guy to help me with UI, but he ghosted me, and I'm not gonna throw even more of extra work at my artists right now, so sadly UI will stay similar to the old one (for now). You guys can probably endure shitty UI for a bit more, but broken animations/events or another delay would be more annoying to you, I bet.

As usual, there were some problems, shitstorms and other stuff. For example, right now my heaters are cold as hell (ok, bad comparison), there's snow outside and I'm dealing with 17-18C degrees at home, so I'm a bit freezing. Lately, I'm doing my best to stay positive, but there's one thing after another, and December will be a peak of madness, sigh...

Cheers!