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Getting ready for tomorrow's release of the first chapter of With Eyes Closed.
🕑 Added 2023-04-13 18:12:10 +0000 UTCThe first chapter is complete. It will be available in early access tomorrow for the $25 Tier and will become available for the rest according to the description for each Tier.
All Tiers have been revised. There will be a separate post describing it in more detail.
You can check out the description of the game, screenshots, and the main features in the About section at the top of the Patreon page.
I should note right away that the project is planned for a long time, several years of development, so the relationships with the girls will develop realistically. They won't rush into your bed from the first minute of acquaintance, I think that's not fun. It's important to me that you fall in love with these characters, and that takes time. There will be some hot scenes in the first chapter, two of them to be exact. One short, and one long. My impression is that the long scene is much better than anything in Going Rogue. It has a lot of animations, it's done pretty well (at least I think it's a noticeable progress in quality), and it gives you an idea of how I plan on doing scenes like this in the future.
The first chapter is 1.5-2.5 hours long by my calculations. It's definitely at least twice as long as the chapters in Going Rogue. In creating this one, I was following the needs of the story. I needed to tell you about the world the game will take place in, get to know the characters and finish at an interesting point. I hope you appreciate the massive amount of work I did.
What I failed to do of what I promised:
1. Meet deadlines.
To be clear, I never gave exact release dates. And yet I did give approximate dates and moved them up a few times. I apologize, but it was due to objective reasons. Work with the code and the interface has taken a very long time.
First of all, the game now has a nicely decorated chapter results. I have not seen anything like this in the indie VN. But I have not played all of them, so I can assume that someone has done something similar, but still I really like the result.
Secondly, making two different resolutions for the game is not easy at all. Moreover, I had to make a universal variant, so that I don't have several folders with the same game and have to make changes in each one separately. I needed to make the most universal version that could easily change resolutions. This took a lot of time, especially since I'm very bad at using photoshop.
My future aim is to release similar-sized updates in three months and finish the first episode by the end of the year (no promises, but I'll strive for that.) I might break chapters into two parts so I can release updates more often. I haven't decided yet.
2. Make a 4k version.
I ended up deciding to do 2k UHD, even though all of my renders were originally done in 4k. There are several reasons for this:
The 4k version lags even on a top-end computer. Animations freeze. Moreover, they are running fine in a standalone player, but inside the game they lag. Probably a problem with the engine itself. I think I could fix this problem by reducing the video quality, but then what's the point of doing 4k at all?
The 4k version takes up a lot of space. The first chapter was 8.5 gb.
4k monitors are not that common.
These factors combined, I decided to go with the 2k UHD version.
3. Iron man mode.
I wrote that I want to make this mode. But you can see for yourself how long the development process took and I don't want to postpone it even further because of the mode, which is likely to be in demand by less than 5% of the players. If I have time in the future, I'll come back to this idea.
Everything else, including the 60 fps animations, I have fulfilled.
What problems exist:
I tested the pc version myself, a lot of times. All the bugs I found, I fixed. I think there will be no problems.
The Mac OS version I haven't tested. I don't have a Mac and the Mac share is very small. That said, I have never once heard of any problems with the Mac in Going Rogue.
The Android version I tested on an emulator. There are a few problems with the interface there. Some of the interface frames are displayed incompletely. The gameplay is not affected, and I don't understand what this is related to yet, so I'm holding off on fixing it. Also on the android version I have incorrectly shown chapter results. I have absolutely no idea what is the reason of it, as there is a fairly simple realization. It just shows multiple layers, depending on your decisions. I don't understand what the problem is and hope it's because of the emulator. If there will be feedback that the problem is widespread, I will try to fix it, but in the worst case I will have to disable the chapter results for android.
The 2k UHD version can be slow on low-end computers. The problem is again with the animations, but on my pc, everything works with no problems. I need more feedback from you, but if you have an older pc, I would recommend stopping with the regular 1080p version.
