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Choosing Quality Over Quantity & What This Means
🕑 Added 2020-04-23 09:00:07 +0000 UTCRant time!
So it's only natural that we've had a lot of inquiries from fans of the game about this. The burning question on everyone's mind for obvious reasons: "update when?"
While this is a little hard to answer directly -- what I can say is that Alorth and I are able to work together pretty efficiently and because of this updates will come significantly faster than they do for my other game... which is a solo project.
That said... I wanted to give you guys more insight into why this won't be one of those games that cranks out an hour of gameplay every other week... but the short answer is we're choosing quality over quantity... and I'm going to explain exactly what that means.
First, let's get the obvious out of the way: the renders.
Our 3D renders alone are up to 20k iterations. This means they can take sometimes double the amount of time than your typical mainstream game. There is also a lot of post-work that is done in addition to this. This culminates into taking sometimes a full two weeks just to render a single scene... and that's with an RTX 2080Ti (one of the most powerful graphics cards on the market) and two rendering machines.
Next up: the writing. Anyone who has ever written a story understands that this can be a major process... especially if you're a writer who genuinely cares about the quality of said story. It drains a lot of energy and creativity to be able to write at even 60% of my own capacity. The process I use to write the game works as follows:
Stage 1: I start writing a rough draft of something as if it were the early-stages of a plain old novel. If you've played my other game, Polarity, I started writing this at approximately the same time as Radiant... but this was a "first draft" and it is a very rough version.
Stage 2: I then make changes, updates, and revisions to the script before sending it over to my artist so he can use it to create our renders. Before doing so I annotate every single line where a render is needed to ensure there is no confusion in transforming what is written into an on-screen visual. This part of the process isn't as easy as it sounds.
Stage 3: Finally... I revise the script one more time while transferring it over to Atom: the text editor used when coding the game. If you're skeptical of this just ask Alorth: what is delivered to him is very different from what he sees in the actual game.
Next up: the game's design. As I'm sure you can all see a fair amount of thought and effort goes into this. I want the game to not just feel flexible with its choice system... I also want every path to feel unique and fully fleshed out. In-turn the game has a fairly good amount of replayability right from the start.
While you likely won't see much evidence for this in its early-chapters, since most of that is occurring behind the scenes, this will have game-changing effects later on (to the point where nearly every playthrough will be mostly dynamic). This sets Radiant above a linear visual novel and transforms it into an actual video game... so it's something I care about a lot and put a great deal of effort into.
And finally: we have the process of coding. If this feels like a "polished game" with solid production value... there's a very good reason for that. It most certainly isn't something that just... happens. In fact this can be a ton of work... to the point where even explaining it is something I will need to break down into sections.
So here we go... let's break it down:
Transitions: This is where I make sure every image/video/song/sound flows seamlessly and doesn't create jumps, jitters, or skips. This means when an image changes: it occurs smoothly. When a scene ends: it occurs smoothly. When a facial expression or pose changes: it occurs smoothly. When a pause happens: it occurs smoothly. When a video plays or switches: it occurs smoothly. This is what I mean when I say I'm coding the game's transitions.
These on their own make up around 1,500 lines of code... or more specifically, somewhere around 10,000 written words per chapter (and that is a very conservative estimate). These also have to be play-tested to ensure they're functioning as intended.
Music & Sounds: When I add music and sound effects to the game, I have to run an in-game test for every single song and sound effect that you hear. This is to ensure that the audio is starting at the right time, fading in properly, fading out properly, and actually fits in & works with each respective scene.
I also personally will sometimes cut/edit/mix the tracks to make sure they loop properly... amplify or reduce the loudness to ensure it's not blasting your ears off... and more. Hell, I even made my own custom "car horn" sound effect using a soundbite of a simple air horn. I'll even use "sound tricks" that require making entirely new tracks from time to time. For example: in the very first scene of the game the music is "muffled" when standing outside of the dance hall.... and then it becomes loud/unmuffled when you open the door. This isn't some built in function of Ren'Py so it can take time to sort out.
Variables: Every time you make a decision in this game... it is calculated. There are only a few exceptions where your decisions will simply lead to different dialogue or "flavor text." This needs to be planned carefully to ensure your choices have impact, you won't run into broken saves, and it's something that is planned anywhere from three to five full chapters ahead of time. This is a necessity, however, to ensure your choices in this game actually matter... and I have no intentions of giving players the illusion of choice.
So yeah... when you factor all these things together with the various other "time drains" I haven't even mentioned yet; animations & animation loops, graphic artwork, chapter screens, status screens, buttons, banners, splash art, testing, proofreading, and more... you can hopefully see why making a quality game is something that takes more time.
It would be easier for us to just throw everything together: we could cut our render times in half (thus cutting the quality in half) or just sort of mash some words together to form an "acceptable" story... but I don't want that, I don't think you guys want that... and it will never happen. So yeah... this definitely isn't the kind of game that takes a mere 15-20 days per update... but worry not -- I know you guys are eager and that's why we're taking steps to reduce the time required for each new update.
Once we hit our next Patreon goal we will actually be buying ANOTHER rendering machine and I will be upgrading my personal rig as well... so hopefully in time we can narrow our updates down to exactly 30 days. I'm definitely not saying that you'll have to wait two months per update. I'm pretty certain it won't take that long and an exact time frame is still being figured out. Instead, the purpose of writing this is to help you guys understand the major differences between this game and its competitors.
Simply put... not every game developer puts forward the level of care and effort into the quality... but I believe at the end of the day this will be a net positive for us all.
Thanks for taking the time to read my long-winded explanations!
