Novus
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Update - Current Tentative Plans
🕑 Added 2025-10-06 00:20:31 +0000 UTC*Note- If you don't care about the sound issue stuff, at least skip to the bottom for an explanation why there currently isn't a third poll.
Alright, if you don't know what this is talking about, please go and read THIS POST which explains the clusterfuck I'm currently caught up in regarding sound replacement for Left Hand Magic.
After that post, I had to take a few days to try and sort out what to do, and I haven't yet come to any solid conclusions. After wrestling with the issue, I realized that one way or another I need more information, so to speak. I just flat out don't have a very good grasp on how time and energy intensive replacing all the moan tracks in the game with something more synched to the animations is going to be. This both means I can't estimate how long it would take me, if I do it myself, and I can't really try to hire someone else without a better grasp on what I'm asking of them.
Thankfully, I also realized that the fact I fully intended for half of this month to be finish/polish work anyway, leaves me with at least a little breathing room.
Currently, what I'm doing is effectively pushing hard to finish up the actual rendering work for new content that was planned for this month. I'm already done with the Harem Route Council Event, and the Epilogue shouldn't take more than a couple of days. After that, maybe 3-4 days more for finishing up the Arianna friends-with-benefits route I've promised.
If I push through all of it quickly, I figured from the start that I would be able to wrap up the rendering, programming, and even writing by around the 15th. Originally, my intentions for after that were to spend the rest of the month making all the improvements I needed. Better post processing in the early game, some replacement renders, a better looking menu and improved cheats system, improved sprites, another editing pass through the whole game. Etc. A lot of polish work to turn the game more professional looking work, essentially.
I've decided, since a certain amount of delay is going to be caused by this clusterfuck one way or another, that I'm going to hijack at least a few days of that to do some sound work myself. Essentially, spending those days trying to figure the answers to 'how hard is this actually.' This will allow me to make a better-informed choice between the options I outlined previously, going forward.
Here is the third poll absence explanation:
This decision is also what led to me delaying the 'Feedback/Focus' poll for this month. Depending on which option I go with for what to do about the sound issues, that poll may turn into Multiple Major Polls which will start selecting details about the next game I make.
A poll of some sort regarding that will appear, one way or another, but I need to sort out how time critical the answers I still need are first. Originally, I was going to run a whole series over November and December as I didn't intend to start work on even a tech demo until December (with a pause of the Patreon Page in November for LHM's release). Since the order of things is now a bit up in the air, I may instead be pushing to do several polls all at once to gather the remaining needed information so that I can start a tech demo in November...
Comments
Novus
Good to know. A lot of what I need to do is going to be figuring out the software to use. The 'animations' in Left Hand Magic are actually video files. Renpy's built in animation framework isn't good for the 20-40 frames per second animations I use (it's really built for a handful of loops frames, like most VNs use). So I resolved that by handling the animations files in DaVinci Resolve and outputting them as a video. The thing is, I haven't used Resolve for AUDIO before. I was previously using Audacity to edit audio (because I was familiar with it already), then just playing the audio track separately from the video within the game. I need to take time to figure out if Resolve can handle editing audio as well (I have no idea), and if it can, how to use it. If it can't, then what software to use instead. This is why I was offloading it to a third party in the first place, as it essentially means picking up an entirely new subset of skills and learning more software. Which is time I preferred to spend working on other parts of the game -_-. I'm a reasonably fast learner, so a few days should be enough to at least get a rough concept of how much labor is involved, though...
Merlin
Well if it makes you feel any better, moan tracks should be much easier to sync than some other sound tracks. It does depend on your animation and how complex that is, but if you have both up at the same time you can see the exact timing you need for each, and go from there to create the sound tracks and set up the actual timing. You do not need to be within 1/100 of a second or something ridiculous like that, so you do have some leeway. If you have very little experience with sound files, this is going to have quite a learning curve unfortunately.
