Friday (Saturday) Night Beach Chat #22 (Patreon)

Hello everyone for the first Saturday Night Beach Chat. ;-)

So sorry I couldn't post yesterday, was so busy trying to get some stubborn images to render. My computer's been rendering non-stop for the last 24 hours, had to half-bake some of the renders to get the update wrapped up and will have to re-do those images this week. Some of them also have errors so, yeah...I've got a long list of images that I'm going to need to re-do this week.

Moving on, tonight starts the writing on Chapter 3 (v0.4.0). Version 0.3 was just finishing up Chapter 2, it was quite large and so much work to complete. 566 total renders!!

Chapter 3 I'm moving to a new workflow that will hopefully not trap me like Chapter 2 did. For those of you who are new, I messed up big and lost track of all the branching I was doing. Which ended up ballooning the end of Chapter 2 with each branch ending in a sex scene. Each one slightly different than the other. As you can see from the render counts; version 0.2 had 718 renders and v0.3 has as stated above 566. So just the sex scenes for all these branches was almost as much as the entire v0.2 update.

This is my first game, so everything is a learning experience and iteration. My workflow for the v0.1 release was that I wrote the entire thing ahead of time and then spent the next 4-5 months rendering the images for it and did not write for that entire time. This made things drag on for me, I wanted to write more and progress the story but I had written so much ahead of time there were too many renders left to do. Adding more would have further extended the release. It also made things difficult to start writing chapter 2 because it had been so long.

For Chapter 2 I changed my workflow, this time I was going to write a chunk, then render the images. Then move on to the next chunk and render those images. This worked great, at first. It made me excited to work on the game, and kept my urge to write satisfied. Unfortunately it also left the writing open and unfinished. Which meant while I had finished writing a chunk and was rendering images, I'd come up with neat ideas for scenes. Since the update wasn't fully written yet, not locked in. It was easy to just add these ideas in, which well kinda fucked me in the back end of the Chapter. :-)

And now we iterate again on the workflow; smaller chapters (updates) where I spend a week to write with an image budget (currently thinking 300 renders). Once I've spent that budget, that's where the update ends. Then I spend the next 4 weeks (might extend to 5) rendering the art. Hopefully this will keep me engaged with the writing and keep things manageable because there is no way I can keep up the pace I have with v0.3. Putting in 35 hours a week on the game while still having a full time job, that will quickly lead to burn-out. Anyways, if you made it this far..thanks for reading my ramblings.

Sneak Peeks this week follow a theme; alternate realities.

Anyways that's it this week, have a great weekend and thanks for all the support.