Update! (Patreon)

Hey All!

A fairly detailed update this month, to talk about what I have been working on, and what comes next for DGA.

I disabled last months rewards, but this month’s rewards will be active, so expect a content delivery from me some time later in September. I will keep you up to date on more specific dates, but it will be in the latter half of the month.

Progress:
This month I am taking a step back from focusing on polished animation, and am instead closing the largest gap in the project (between 088 and 078) through blockouts. I may end up doing some polish work towards the end of September, but I am not sure how much this will be, if any.

My estimate of 6 shots missing has proven overly optimistic. I have completed 6 blocked shots this month and am working on the 7th, and currently expect there to be a total of 11 new shots needed for this missing sequence. I aim to have this done before delivering rewards, and the new content looks likely to be a bit under a minute long.

Complexity Points:
As a result of this, I’ll be updating the shot list to include a number of new shots, as well as some refactoring in other areas. Because ‘closing the gap’ has regularly proven to take more shots than I initially thought, I am also adding in additional blank shots in the last two gaps in order to give a more accurate estimate on the project’s project. This will increase the amount of complexity points needed (and thus push the overall progress down)

This is NOT caused by scope creep; I am still making the same animation I have planned for. It is to account for under-scoping of the original vision. My apologies; this is all best guess stuff, and I have a clear bias to be optimistic on how complex a sequence will be. The new complexity is taking this into account so I hopefully don't need to refactor upwards again later on.

Expect the remaining complexity points to go back up to around 120 this month.

Delivery Roadmap:
I’m going to continue the two months per delivery cadence, as that is how long it is taking me to get a decent amount of content to justify a rewards cycle.
Barring anything unforeseen popping up IRL, I plan to release two more rewards this year after this coming delivery. Meaning there will be one at the end of August (delivered some time in September), October (delivered some time in November) and December (delivered some time in January)

The projects for the rest of the year will be DGA, though I may switch back to MLK next year

Rig Updates:
I am aiming to finalize Andre’s Rig by the end of the year. The majority of that is volume corrects in his arms and legs. I need to lock in his rig for the purposes of his harness simulation, which can't really be solved until there will be no changes to his underlying mesh.

Straps:
About half the shots will have straps that will need to be simulated, as well as custom maps made for Andre when they are digging into his flesh. I have loose plans on how this might come about but am blocked by the rig not being finalized yet.

Environment:
The two remaining gaps (the intro and after shot 085) are dependent on a final environment as they will have environment dependent animations. It will also unblock me from making final animations for the work that has been done (each shot will need some tweaking and final polish in the final environment before I do a 4K render.)

I am planning on outsourcing this but don’t yet have anyone in mind. I might be able to find someone on fiverr, but would rather source someone from the community. So if you know any professional environment artists, please feel free to recommend them! There will be a sizable budget for this thanks to your support. I am likely to start looking to start early next year.

Reindexing:
I am reindexing shots to be in order. (as a big frustration/piece of feedback I got was that having shots ordered in random indexing was frustrating and made it difficult to identify what shot I am talking about.

This will be a gradual process, as it takes about 10 minutes to properly reindex a shot. There are a lot of associated files I need to rename, as the index is the identifier of each shot. So it's something I am doing when I have short bursts of downtime. The project will be reindexed gradually over the coming months.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!