Developer's Journal #10 (Patreon)

Hello my friends.

I spent this week mostly working on still renders.  The particular scene I was doing, Rockford and Aghavni driving, turned out to be a bit of a challenge.  I had anticipated this being an easy transitory part of the story and that I could get the renders done in a night or two.  But I didn't consider that when the characters are driving around in a car the background scenery has to constantly change, which ended up being a lot of work.  This and other challenges, including the fact that I needed two sets of renders for this scene (you'll see why), kept me working on the scene all week.  But the total number of post-worked still renders continues to grow and now stands at about 530.  By comparison, the Demo had 651 still renders and one brief animation.

When I launched my Patreon on July 5th, two days after publishing the Demo, I announced that my goal was to publish Part One by the end of August.  But I also said I couldn't make any promises or firm predictions.  Indeed, it is now September 3rd.  And so you may be wondering how much is left for me to do?

Just adding up raw lines of code (not lines of dialogue), I've finished renders for about 1,750 lines of code with about 930 to go.  That puts me at roughly 65% of the way there.  I have five environments left to build.  Three of these are the interior of an airport, a restaurant/cafe, and judicial chambers.  Based on what's already available in the Daz store, I don't expect to do much customization on these, so they shouldn't take too long to set up (other than maybe creating extra people for background scenery).  There's also an apartment setting planned which will need some moderate customization.  The fifth environment is for Aghavni's homicide unit.  I've already spent a fair amount of time modifying one "detectives' room" available in the Daz store, but I'm considering scrapping it and building a new one using a standard office cubicle setup.  There is one more new environment, and that is Sean and Donna Lee's house, but I finished that months ago even before I'd finished Rockford's office.  Remind me to tell you why another time (ask me about "The Not Guilty Verdict").  There are also a couple of other tasks left which I will talk about another time.

Next weekend I will be unable to work on the game for at least four days.  This is going to kill me, as since Christmas there has been only one day when I haven't worked on this game in one form or another.  But my family has a once in a lifetime event planned that must take priority.  Consequently I expect to deliver my weekly update Sunday rather than Saturday, and will not otherwise be working on the game from Friday through Monday.  My job will also continue to be very busy for the next two weeks.  But I will find time to work on the game, as I always do, in the wee hours of the night.

I am looking forward to some slightly cooler weather.  This week temperatures here passed 110 degrees.  My window air conditioning units do not reach my rendering station, which gets very hot due to the rendering process.  So you can imagine how much I was suffering while working on the game this week.  But I still love doing this so much I never considered taking even one night off.

I am appreciative of and humbled by your support.

--Monk