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Development Update - 27.10.2022
🕑 Added 2022-10-27 12:04:14 +0000 UTCHello everyone!
It was a tough week. I had some troubles with rendering - suddenly, for some weird reason scenes with Alexa were rendering crazy long. There were multiple situations when I checked my rendering queue only to see that it was stuck on one render for 8 hours straight. It didn’t fall back to CPU, it just slowly progressed through 2-3 iterations per 10 minutes. I wasted many hours trying to figure out what’s wrong and I discovered that it was Alexa’s model issue - it just made every image render crazy slow. After banging my head against the wall for the next couple of hours I tried to use a different GPU driver and it helped, at least for now. Fingers crossed there won’t be any more surprises like this in the future 😄
But after all I have 160 images rendered, there’s still a lot of images waiting in the queue to render too. I hope till the end of the week I’ll manage to render it all and give you the proper number of the images in the next development update.
Halloween is coming and I think it’s a perfect time to give you something special. I want to give something to everyone who’s following us - I was thinking about making one special render with two versions - first one SFW for everyone and the second one NSFW for Patrons only. But as usual I love to give you some power - make you decide the setting of the render and who should be featured in it.
Polls for Gamblers and higher Patrons (5$+):
Who should be featured in the render - POLL
Setting of the render - POLL
And here are a few words from Joshua 😊
The script is moving along well, with over 30,000 words already. The story is starting to really build up momentum into the first character arc and setting the scene for the various interactions Jake will have with the love interests. Another positive note is that we've been getting an enormous amount of feedback, along with suggestions for improvement. Some are plot-related, like a character behaving a certain way or a detail that strikes you as being out of place, but so far most of those have been intentional (the context will be apparent in further releases).
Some other criticisms were around the gameplay experience. A big one was that there was too much plot explained via SMS. Some people said it was a minor thing, others thought it was the biggest area that could be improved. There are plans to improve the interface and mechanics, but that's going to need specialist help, and it's not really in the budget just yet, however, I've heard everyone loud and clear to keep the SMS interactions shorter and create a lot more face to face interaction (though no one seemed to mind the occasional lewd pic showing up on their phone). This sort of game mechanic feedback is extremely valuable, and definitely something we take notice of. Please do feel free to pass on any feedback you might have. We do read it all. We have also had a bit of "Why don't you do <Specific kink>" and the answer is pretty much that it's not in the story we want to tell. If Jake (or one of the love interests) has a certain kink, then the interactions between them need to recognise and develop that kink. It creates a whole new story branch, and when I look at the pathways we've already mapped out, adding more branches that don't link back to large portions of the story isn't really compatible with the timeline we're aiming for. There's already plenty of those as it is, and while they make the game more consequential in the later episodes, it's a pretty complex web of story-telling that I don't want to make harder. So, if we're not including a specific kink that you want, it's not because we hate you, it's just not part of this particular story that we're telling. We've also had a lot of varied feedback about which love interest is the favourite. There's the Maggie Massive, the V-Team, the Alexa Army, The Nat Pack, The Jas Clan and even a few in the Allie Rally.
I'm really pleased that people have had different favourites so far. The girls are different characters, and they'll interact with Jake in different ways for different reasons. I'm glad to see that people have different opinions about which one they like the most, because that's the way a branching story should be. I really didn't want there to be one 'right' option with the other love interests as random decoration.
Right now, I'm writing another race scene where we're tweaking the race mechanics a bit. They will evolve as Jake gets better behind the wheel. A lot of people have also been asking about the preview scene from Episode 1 and whether Episode 2 will start from there. Without giving too much away, it doesn't. That scene does appear in Episode 2, but is in the later part of the episode, so there will be plenty of story to give context to the 'what', 'how', 'where', and 'why' of all of that. So that's where it's sitting at the moment.
I hope everyone has enjoyed playing ep 1, and maybe even replaying it too. Also, a huge thanks to the Patrons who have signed up or stayed with Underground Studios. It really is encouraging to see so many people wanting to help us tell this story. Thanks again!
