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FreshWomen Season 2 - Episode 3 Complete: Everything we’ll fix and Changing our Release Strategy
🕑 Added 2024-11-01 23:27:17 +0000 UTCHello, my dear Freshmen!
Today I want to update you on our progress in fixing Season 2 Episode 3 Complete, and to talk to you about a few changes we’ll make in our release pipeline to ensure delays won’t happen again in the future, and to take care of our team’s health.
As you know, on Wednesday, we decided to postpone our release in order to fix and improve a few things, and guarantee it was up to our quality standard. This was not an easy decision, as we usually don’t delay updates after they are officially announced, but, in this case, it was a necessary choice to ensure you’d have a perfect experience.
Yesterday, I sat down with the team, and we spent a few hours going through Susan’s Scene and analyzing everything we wanted to fix. After that, with our final scope in hands, we divided the tasks and went for it.
Here’s where we are so far:
Renders: there are 27 renders we want to improve. These improvements are to fix lighting, facial expressions, composition, and other minor issues. Of these 27, 22 are rendering now. This is the easiest task, and should be done on Monday or Tuesday.
Animations: this is where most of the fixes lie. There are 37 animations total in this part, and we want to improve 15 of them. Most of these improvements are easy fixes, such as looping issues, or sweat issues, and should be done fairly quickly, but, a few of them are structural problems. This means these animations have problems in the blocking stage, and will demand more time and attention. The good news is, there are only 3 animations with structural problems. We are on our way to having 5 animations finalized by the end of the day today. Next week, me and two other team members will join in to speed up this process. Our dedicated animator will fix the ones that need animation heavy corrections, and other team members will fix those that have other issues. This is our biggest mountain to climb at the moment, but, we’ll get through it soon!
Sound Design: We want to use this extra time to make improvements to Susan’s Sex Scene sound design too, and ensure her voice, moans and whispers are faithful to her character. We already contacted our Sound Designer, and explained to him what we need to improve, and talked to our Voice Actress so she can send us an extra voice pack for this scene. I believe this will be the extra cherry on top of this scene, and make it more special for you.
Skins: a few of our skins were blurry and lacking detail after rendering. This was caused by a wrong render preset. We already fixed the issue and sent them to render again. They should be done rendering this evening.
I’m working closely with our team to fix everything in a timely manner, and we’ll get through this soon.
I also want to thank you for your patience and support, and to talk to you about why this happened, how it impacted us, and what we’ll change so it won’t happen again in the future.
I joined FreshWomen in Season 1 Episode 2, more than 3 years ago. At the time, our release process was simple and easy. When most of the content is done, we release an Alpha and announce a release date. Then, we collect feedbacks from our Alpha Testers, fix everything we need to fix, and release.
Simple.
The thing is, since Season 1 Episode 2, our game scope has increased. A LOT. Here are a few things that are different now:
The game has 4 resolutions: 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 4K.
More animations: we more than doubled the number of animations per sex scene, and, they are all in 60FPS now. We also use mocap in a lot of animations now, which is more complex.
Translation: every release is now available in 14 different languages.
Voice Acting and sexy sounds: our chapters are now fully voice acted, every line, on every character, except for MC. Animations also have foley and moans now.
Sweat, HD Maps, and a dedicated team to create characters and environments.
Customization: players now can select skins and pubes on a few scenes.
Physics: cloths now are simulated for faster adjustments and more accuracy
Post Production: every render goes through color adjustment, effects and visual polishing before release.
And more.
It’s a different reality now, with many, many more points of attention and points of failure, and a much, much more complex pipeline.
However, our release strategy stayed the same. When everything is almost done, announce the release date, and fix what’s left.
With this release strategy, and an ever-increasing amount of complexity and content, this created a situation where every release became a bet against time, and introduced crunch into our lives.
Every time we released an episode, the days before were hell. Sleeping 3 or 4 hours a day, working well into the night and solving numerous problems, filled with anxiety that we wouldn’t make it in time, would have to cut content or drop our quality. Not being able to do anything, except work as fast as I could so we wouldn’t fail.
Initially, this would only affect me, but, lately, it’s affecting more, and more people in our team, creating a culture of stress, confusion, and overwork.
This is bad. Very bad. I don’t want our team to be anxious, stressed and uncertain. I don’t want them to hate what they do, or to feel they don’t do enough. And I don’t want to be like this, either. We have to do better.
The way I see it, my role can be summed up in three points:
To protect our games: ensure the games we release have the highest quality possible, and stay true to their core principles and messages.
To protect our players: to hear our players, and give our community an active voice, make sure they are heard and that we’re delivering the games they want to play.
To protect our team: to give everything our team members need to deliver their best work, be it technical support, guidance, equipment, assets, etc.
Our current release strategy is working against this, and making me fail to protect one of our most important assets: the people that create the games we love.
So it’s time for a change.
What we’ll do is simple in concept, but powerful in execution: We won’t announce release dates early.
We’ll announce a new release at the exact time that it’s ready. Not when “there are just a few more animations to render” or when “Chloe’s hair looks weird in this scene, but it’s an easy fix”. We’ll announce it when it’s done. No more fixes, no more renders, no more lines to record, done!
This simple change of timing will bring tranquility to our team, eliminate crunch and give us reliable release dates, always. It also won’t affect our productivity or make the time between updates longer.
We love working on FreshWomen and Forbbiden Fantasy, and I want to create an environment where our team can give their best, while still maintaining their mental and physical health, so we can create great games together for a long time, and this will help us do that.
Before I go, I’d like to thank each and every one of you. This was a very hard week for all of us. We had to postpone a very important update, that we were excited to release, and you were excited to play. We were afraid to do so, and, while you were disappointed, you heard us, and were patient and supportive.
This makes me emotional, honestly. We couldn’t ask for a better community! Thank you so much for being with us, for your patience and support, and for loving our games. Thank you for the comments, feedbacks and for everything, really. FreshWomen and Forbbiden Fantasy exists thanks to you, and it’s a great honor for us to create these games by your side!
So thank you! We’ll release our next part soon, and create better structures and strategies, to ensure we can give you our best, always!
See you soon,
f1r3
Comments
Paltse
A very respectable change when executed properly, I say. Back towards the old days as much as possible nowadays. I still remember the time when alpha was reserved for the team producing the program, beta was sent to testers other than alpha testers and going Gold was a new invention in the Naming-a-thing-another-thing -departments of corporations.
Scout Master
This is what makes good leadership and commitment, as a paying customer, take all the time you need to ensure your product reaches peak performance. I appreciate all the hard work the team has poured into this project.
Zac
Good on you for prioritising your team's health.
