Early development history

[Wolfschadowe]

Thursday, 2013-11-07

Most of the last week has been spent rendering images. All the success paths, and most of the failure paths are storyboarded. I'm still working on the storyboard for a few of the fail-down, and fail-out paths. Fail-Down paths are ones that lead to less desirable or alternate endings. Fail out paths lead to ending the relationship with a girl, or ending the game. The game ends if no more relationships are available. To give an idea of the amount of time that goes into a game like this, consider that I target each render for each image to take about 30 minutes. I adjust the detail of the render engine to hit that target, so simple scenes may have higher detail while more complex scenes will have lower detail. Setting up the scene for each render takes anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes, depending on how different it is from the previous render. 5 minute set-ups are generally those where I am just changing expressions, making a gesture and adjusting "living" elements in the background. 30 minute set-ups are those where I'm changing the scene, lighting, and camera angle. Animations that I'm doing now are a different story. Those usually take about 2 hours to set up all 30 frames and render overnight. Usually they finish by noon the next day. Then when you factor in making the webpage, and writing and testing the game logic, each web page takes, in total, about an hour of effort. For the current scene, that comes out to about 300 hours of effort. Granted, sometimes I can work on web pages and story-boarding during actual render time so it cut's it down a bit. Consider that I have a job and family, so don't work on it full time, so I can put an average of 3 hours a day, at the most, into the game, meaning it takes roughly 100 days to make 300 web pages for the Day 2 office scene. Consider the game will have about 1600 web pages when I am done with this scene...well, enough said about that. My purpose of discussing the timings on this post is primarily so that others looking to make these games have a better idea of the effort that needs to go into them. I know when I started working on BEW, I had no idea that it would take this much effort. I naively thought I could finish the entire game by now. I laugh at that innocent self from way back in March. Thankfully, I'm still having a lot of fun working on the game.

[Wolfschadowe]

Thursday, 2013-11-21

Wow, I didn't realize it had been this long since an update. I apologize to the, approximately, three people who are still interested and following the game at this point. I have the office scene fully storyboarded and am just rendering all the images and building out web pages at this point. This was always going to be one of the largest, most complicated scenes of the game, and the evening date scenes will be equally complicated, but they won't be quite as big. They are the climax of the first act (pun intended.) I also reworked the achievement reporting system to standardize on mode four. That means that sub-achievements will not be visible or reported other than as a Percentage Completion for each scene. In addition to some overarching gamelong achievements, Each scene will have the following achievements:

1. Completed once (Opens the achievement reporting for that scene)
2. Achievement for finding all the endings
3. Achievement for finding all the major activities.
4. Achievement for 100% Mastery of the scene, including special achievements.
5+ Anywhere from 0-4 special achievements, depending on scene size.

Also, as I mentioned in my last update, the game is taking a lot longer than I expected. I naively thought that I'd be done with it by now, or at least almost done, and here I'm just about 80% done with the first act, let alone all three. Rather than waiting 2-3 more years for me to finish the entire game, I've decided to release the game by Act. I still plan to finish the entire game, but It was always designed so that each Act could stand on its own in case I got bored with it, which luckily hasn't happened yet! Act 2 & 3 will be savegame compatible with Act 1. In fact, when I'm done the games will likely release as first: Act 1, Second: Act 1-2, and Third: Act 1-3. I also plan to beg and plead with Tlaero or someone else in the know to help me figure out a code system so that those who lose their savegames between Act 1 and 2 will be able to enter a code to continue in Act 2 where they left off in Act 1. Each Act has a satisfying ending where the player can feel like they won the game, and Acts 1 & 2 both end on story cliffhangers as any good miniseries should.

Each Act will have from 2000-3000 webpages, by my estimate. The full series will likely approach 10,000 pages, so you hard-core completionists out there...beware!

[Wolfschadowe]

Friday, 2013-12-13

The holidays have been interfering with my availability, but I'm still making progress on BEW. A little slower than I'd like, but not bad altogether. Like my last update, the storyboard is completed, and most of the game logic for the scene is completed as well as adding in the Achievements to the scene. I am just waiting on the rendering to complete to finish up the pages. I have the second half of the office scene about 3/4 of the way done rendering. I'm hoping to make good progress this week since I should be working from the home office and family obligations are minimal until next week's holiday interferes again. I've also got much of one of the dates storyboarded as well for day 2 evening. The office scene concentrates mainly on Emily, as well as one of the dates. The other dates focus primarily on Natalie and Faith. Thank you everyone for your patience!

[Wolfschadowe]

Wednesday, 2013-12-18

I pulled a dumbass maneuver and lost a little over a weeks worth of work on my storyboard. When I re-installed my O/S on my laptop a couple months ago, I forgot to enable autosave in Visio, which is where I write my storyboard. Then, Visio crashed last night, and I hadn't saved since last week! All the backups in the world don't help unless you actually save the file! Unlike Word or Excel, Visio does not have auto-recover capabilities either. I will need new paint in this room because my words scorched the walls when I discovered how long it had been since I saved.

Oh well. Autosave is now enabled and I'm rebuilding the storyboard parts that were lost. It probably won't delay anything since rendering is the current bottleneck.

[Wolfschadowe]

Monday, 2014-01-06

The holidays really interfered with working on BEW. I didn't get much done over the last couple of weeks. One of the office scene branches felt forced going into the erotic section, so I reworked that while other things were rendering, and essentially rewrote the branch. I haven't made the images for it yet, so the impact was low, and it really wasn't a lot of work anyway, but the overall flow of that branch is much better and I'm a lot happier with it. Overall though, not a whole lot to talk about for this update, although I'm getting back into the groove now. Next week will be my 1 year anniversary for doing any type of 3D art at all. Today, I am still learning things about digital art and using the software. It's interesting to see how much my art skill has progressed, over the last year, but there's still a long way to go before I would consider myself good at it.

[Wolfschadowe]

Monday, 2014-01-20

Made good progress in rendering over the past couple of weeks. All three major branches are fully rendered, including the erotic scenes. There are two minor erotic branches to finish up on the render, and also the alternate path to render. It looks like the Day 2 office scene will have close to 600 pages when it's done, although only about 200-250 will be accessible for each playthrough, depending on the path. One of the reasons this is so big is that it's one of two Emily Relationship payoff scenes. For those who are on an Emily relationship path, this is effectively the end of that main branch of the relationship for Act 1. There's still some stuff that can be done in the evening, of course, including losing her as a possible love interest in Acts 2 & 3, or cementing the relationship more solidly. Most of the evening for Day 2 concentrates on Faith and Natalie though. Overall, I hope to finish up rendering for the scene within the next week or two.

Rendering is the primary bottleneck at this point, but on the plus side I've got some techniques down that have reduced the rendering time per image from 20 minutes to somewhere between 5-10, with the same level of quality. This is primarily due to lighting techniques. Unfortunately some of my playing with the lighting is evident in the Office scene, so it gets a little goofy here and there. Hopefully it won't detract from the game too much, but I'd rather get the game out then re-render scenes over and over again until the lighting is perfect. One of the main goals of making BEW was to learn these digital art techniques, and hopefully the game will evidence my growing skill as it progresses. The worst images will be the first images, i hope.

I've been travelling on business over the last week, so that slowed me down a bit, but I also have a head start on storyboarding the next few scenes, so some extra time now is saving me some time later. I have the home transition scene storyboarded, as well as a start on a small supporting scene on one of the corruption paths. Both of those scenes are only about 10-30 pages, so very small in BEW land. heh. Next on the storyboard schedule is to start filling out the Bar scene for day two with Faith...or Emily and Faith, as the case may be. I've broken the scene storyboards into multiple Visio files to make it easier to storyboard on one and render to a second without having to scroll back and forth a lot.

[Wolfschadowe]

Sunday, 2014-02-02

So, it was a year ago that I rendered the first image for BEW. Ok, technically, it was a year ago, four days ago on January 30th, but close enough. It's amazing how much I've learned in the past year, and just as amazing how much I know that I still have to learn about digital art, storytelling, and AIF game creation. I naievly thought that I'd be done with the game by now, and I'm only about 3/4 of the way through the first act. While there are some things I'd do different if I started again, overall, I'm happy with the way the game is shaping up. I could have made a much smaller game and released it by now, but then it wouldn't be the game I wanted to make. Sure, I could have left one of the love interests off for this round, and added her back in as an expansion later. That's probably the one difference I would make if I was starting again, but I don't regret including that additional story line to the first version either. It's still the game I wanted to make when I started, and a year later, I'm still having fun making it. I'd like to thank everyone who is following this and hanging in there, not only for your patience, but also for your continued interest in the game.

As for status, I have completed rendering all the main paths and almost all of the branches. As I am going through my logic pass I keep running across little 4-10 page offshoots that aren't marked as rendered yet, but most of those get filled in with already rendered images. Occasionally one justifies a new render, and I still have a few images from the first half of the office scene to re-render, but I'm probably less than a week from being done with all the rendering for the scene. Once I finish the logic pass and pick up any stray renders, I'll build out the web pages using AC, run spell check and have it out to playtesters. the next few scenes that I'll be working on are small transition scenes. One is the main path of Brad at home before going on his date for the evening (if he has one), or deciding where to go if he doesn't have one yet. That one is only 20 or so pages, once all the branches are accounted for, but only about 10 are actually going to need a unique render. Another small scene is Brad picking Emily up at home before their date for one of the branches. That on is only 10 or so pages since it's a consolidated path. There is also a side branch at the local university to support one of the corruption paths which will be another 20-30 or so. Those should come fairly quickly. After those are completed, the Day 2 Bar scene for all the branches, then the Day two Strip Club. Both of those scenes will be fairly large. There is a third destination available on some paths as well that will come afterwards. Finally, to finish out day 2, there will be fairly short scenes at either Faith's house, Brad's, or Emily's that will lead into the Day 2 Recap. To finish out Act 1 we will have a 40-50 page scene for the morning that will set up Act 2.

That's essentially the road map for the rest of Act 1.

[Wolfschadowe]

Tuesday, 2014-03-04

Lost about two weeks due to work travel on the current scene, but made progress story-boarding later scenes, so that will save time later. Two major branches through the office scene are completely done with everything except spell check and I'm about halfway through building web pages for a third branch. In the meantime, with the decision to release three acts, I've revamped the road map below to outline the new version information. More detail is present for the remainder of Act 1, beyond that is mainly placeholder information. Additionally, there was a request to re-post the original Proof of Concept since Hotfile went belly-up, but I lost that zip file somewhere. I cannibalized the latest playtest release for day 1 content (minus the strip club path) and posted that for anyone interested. No new content per-se, but the recap is re-enabled and achievements are included as the main differences. I've got some good blocks of time over the next couple of weeks, so I should make strong progress in wrapping up the current test build and getting it out to the playtesters.

[Wolfschadowe]

Thursday, 2014-04-03

So...I thought I was done with the office scene. I had all the web pages created, most of the Achievements in and was running the story-lines through my modeler during my logic pass and realized there should be 4 main branches instead of three. I had completely forgotten the Emily Romance line that is accessible only if the player went to the Strip Club instead of the Bar. Sooo...I've got that story-boarded and am about halfway through rendering it. I feel like I've been a week from finishing this scene for a month. HA! Anyway, it's one of the larger scenes in the game. For some context, it's almost the same size as the day one bar and strip club scenes combined. The Bar scene is just over 350 pages, and the Strip club is just over 450. The Day 2 office is nearly 700. On the bright side, I've got total rendering time, including posing for the next render to the point where I'm averaging about 7 an hour, when I'm on a roll. That's less than 10 minutes from start to finish for each image, without a loss of quality. Hopefully the quality level is increasing as my skills increase. Only time will tell though.
Additionally, one of my supporting characters was broken in an update. Trying to pose her makes her arms fly off in random directions which is both entertaining...and a little disturbing. It's something about bone joints in rigging losing their anchor or something. I don't really understand it. Anyway, a patch for that character is being made and once it's complete I'll be able to use her again. The result is that there are a few placeholder images where she is intended to appear, and I'll render those once the model rigging is fixed.

This moves me to Achievements. It won't be in the next release to playtesters, but I'm taking a page from Tlaero's playbook and will be including Daily bonus scenes for those who earn daily mastery achievements. There will also be scenes for Act mastery and overall Game mastery. These scenes will be short, linear blurbs that add to both the story and eroticism. An example is the Day 1 bonus scene that shows what happens at the Bar when Emily arrives if Brad chose to go to the Strip Club that night. These will be what I call "Fly on the wall" scenes where the player just watches what happens rather than interacts. The scenes will be option and once unlocked a link will appear at the end of day screen where the player can chose to "Go to sleep" or "view bonus scene". I'll probably word it differently, but that's the idea. Anyway, progress goes on and I'm still having fun working on this.

[Wolfschadowe]

Saturday, 2014-04-12

While doing my spell check, I noticed that the Day 2 office scene totaled 20,500+ words, without the strip club path in the scene yet.

[Wolfschadowe]

Monday, 2014-04-14

Regarding achievements, personally, on most games I play I shrug them off and mostly ignore them. The initial reason that I included them in BEW is because I received a few requests for them. Since I started using them anyway, I also use them as content flags, simply to let people know that there's more to see. That's the purpose of the ending and activity achievements. Decisions made at the bar have significant impact to what happens later in the game. Also, as the game progresses, different paths get different bits and pieces of the overall story, and different insights to the characters. The achievements help let players know that there is more content there than they probably expect.

In the final game, mastering each day will unlock a bonus scene for that day, as well as bonus scenes for mastering the full acts and the full game. It's not much, but its a bit of a reward for the trouble of finding all achievements for those interested. Some will want to earn them legitimately. Others will want to code dive to help find them all, and others will want to outright cheat. Everyone likes to play the game differently, and as long as everyone is having fun, I have no preference which method is used.

[Wolfschadowe]

Friday, 2014-05-09

Wow, when did I move from an update every couple weeks to monthly updates? Maybe I'll step it up a little.

As of this moment, I have 7 renders remaining to finish the missing path for the day 2 office. The transition is fully storyboarded and the corruption path meeting is about 50% storyboarded. Considering that the missing path had about 150 or so renders to do, and the other two branches for the next version have, maybe 40 or 50 total renders between them, this release should be pretty quick. Maybe ready within the next month or so. Maybe. It should be obvious by now that I'm notoriously bad at estimates.

The broken model hasn't been fixed yet so I have three choices. Either create a new model and re-render all the affected scenes, wait for the model creator to fix the model, or learn how to fix it myself. Since the main point of the game for me is to learn 3D art, I'll probably try to figure out how to fix her myself. I have discovered that the problem is that her bones aren't linked properly. That means when I try to pose her, for example bending a finger, or an elbow, the part pivots around its center instead of the joint. This leads to... mildly disturbing results. Note the fingers below:


Anyway, I'm making good progress on the rendering, and incorporating the playtester comments, bug finds, and suggestions. I think I've lost about half my current playtesters, which is expected considering the duration, but the next group (Group 3) is coming in with the next release.

[Wolfschadowe]

Thursday, 2014-05-15

All the rendering is done for the Office in day two, and I'm doing a validation pass on the full scene. I found some pretty big bugs that the playtesters missed...well, that's not fair, there's no way they could have realistically caught them unless they were validating against the storyboard or capable of reading my mind, so missed isn't the right word. I've also got the home transition scene between the office and Brad's date for the second evening all storyboarded. It's an interesting one because it will have about 20 - 30 web pages, but only about 5 or 6 images to render. I'm too lazy to look up the actual numbers right now. That's because of all the paths converging and re-branching at that point. I've also got about half of the Day 2 bonus scene storyboarded.

There's also a scene that I'm working on for the Natalie corruption path that's scheduled for the next release, but I'm fighting a bit of writers block on that. The story points are there, but the scene just isn't quite working yet and I'm blank on how to fix it for the moment. Luckily there's still a lot of writing and validations to do for the missing office branch, so I can backburner that scene and let my subconscious chew on it a bit. If I finish the office and transition scenes and am still blocked on the corruption scene, I'll probably push it to a later release since it won't impact the next scene on the roadmap.

[Wolfschadowe]

Wednesday, 2014-05-21

I played with LuxRender a bit when I was looking for a good way to queue renders. It can produce some great images, but those images take forever and an hour to hit the quality mark with complex scenes. Plus lux renders continuously until you stop it. I find that the 3delight render that Daz uses is a good trade between speed and efficiency. I can hit the same quality render in 10 minutes with 3delight that takes close to an hour with Lux. Granted, if I let lux run overnight it does produce an amazing result, but getting settings right in Daz, I've found that I can get very similar quality results in less render time. Although with Lux, I can carve off a processor for Daz and work in it during renders, unlike with the built-in engine. Really though, if I wanted a true-life render, lux would be the way to go.

I did find a plug-in for Daz that exports renders to a stand-alone 3Delight render engine and works as a queue. I'll use that now if I have a series of similar images, but since most of my renders are now closer to five minutes, I generally don't bother with it.

[Wolfschadowe]

Thursday, 2014-05-22

I just finished coding the last page for the day 2 office. Looks like it comes in at 697 web pages for that scene bringing the game total up to 1831 pages. I still need to do my logic and validation pass and spellcheck on the scene. I have maybe two or three renders to do for the home transition, along with a bunch of webpages to account for all the branches coming together, also I need to polish off the remaining bugs that playtesters found.

I still haven't got the story working for the Natalie corruption path yet, but I don't really need it until release 0.6.7, so I have time to get it figured out. Currently it's too forced, and businesslike and I need to soften it a bit somehow. I've decided to push it out and work on it later after my subconscious has had some time to chew on it a bit.