OH hey, I didn't see you there. I'm just playing a friendly game of ball with the boys, although Tako insists it's prison rules. I'm not sure if that means he has a shiv hidden in his ass or not. Don't worry, I'm sure Volos has got this for a minute whilst we catch up.
Last week was a mess. Let me talk to you about pursuing a vision to a point of stupidity. I can't show you the output because it would spoil the whole gag, but needless to say I have spent a lot of time trying to get 3 stills that take place in one of the first scenes of this update to a point that satisfies my stupid logic and artistic vision. First I tried a process in Daz that looked garbage, then I paid an artist to work on them. Whilst he is a genuinely great artist, the vision I had for them was just outside of his comfort zone and didn't land right. So here's a little lesson in stupidity when it comes to artistic stubbornness.
Does young Alex(MC) look like Bo Burnham or is it just me?!
Dev Slop
First, a side note. I see a lot of people in other spaces assume devs just use AI now without any reasonable justification. I had this myself on my last update. Thankfully, devs that saw me working on those animations were able to back me up, and that in itself is comforting, but we have reached a point where anything good or outside of people's limited scope for AVNs has to be AI.
This is not a rant necessarily, just a set-up for how much stress I would have saved if I had used AI for the work I am talking about above. But instead I spent money and countless hours chasing a silly gag that ultimately won't make much of a difference, and the reason we do this as devs is because we care about the product we put out. So when someone sees these stills in the next update, just know it may be dumb but I love it, and I personally put my hand to this to avoid giving you something spat out of a machine.
Damn, that was a bit too serious for one of my dev logs. Fuck, urm, say something quick. Did you know it's not legal to take a kangaroo on a commercial flight no matter how well you dress them as your cousin Kevin and swear he just doesn't speak English?
Right, now we are back on track, let's tackle some of the other stuff I did this week. I'd like to thank Rann, who became Moonlight's second Corporate Sponsor and just at the right time to work his cross-universe Formula Zero Tech company into this scene I have been working on this week.
This scene has been a bitch to build and I searched high and low for assets to make it feel right in the world I am building, retextured loads of shit and frankly drove myself insane planning what will be the midpoint of the update and a pretty fun scene regardless of what choices you make. (Remember choices matter!)
I can't show you the preview I'd like to because Patreon would lose their god damn mind, and since my boy Maya got banned recently I ain't taking any chances. If you are curious, you can see a sneak peek on my Discord scene previews channel and I may add it to X later today.
Render wise, did you even fucking do anything this week?
Well first of all, ouch. I have feelings, I think. I must have left them in my other pants. Anyways, yeah, 125 renders this week on top of everything else is pretty good going. I only had to reduce my sleep to 4 hours a night to achieve all this in one week, but me and Fluffy, the anthropomorphised elephant that moved into my office this week, think it was worth the effort.
Lastly, if you made it this far, don't forget my boy Lemon releases later today, so go grab yourself... and play Projekt Passion.
Peace
Bat