We Heading Out? (+ TBP News)

Where has the time gone... I swear it was still winter just a moment ago, though it looks like things have thawed out even in the frigid realm of Skyrim.  I've taken a break from working on The Big Project (news below) to make a little comic about some of my misadventures with Lydia through the frozen tundra and while it's nowhere near finished I thought I should at least post something since it's been a minute... so here's one of the first test renders I did after creating the character in a quickly thrown-together set.

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Now onto the news.  A little over a year ago I embarked on this journey to make a game, an erotic visual novel to be precise, code named The Big Project. Surprise, surprise.  Over this time I've made countless characters, sets and scenes. I've learned a lot about rendering, Blendering and Daz Studio, yet still not enough - not by a long shot.  More focus needs to be put into Blender as I've come to realize just how poor of a tool Daz Studio can be for anything beyond character creation and simple scene rendering.

Unfortunately I've also been hampered every step of the way on this road by limited VRAM and my unwillingness to compromise on the quality of my vision.  I was hoping that GPU pricing would return to sane levels by this time but that doesn't seem likely anymore and especially not for any GPUs with large amounts of memory.  While my system is enough to do scene mock-ups, it's not nearly strong enough to render most of them without running out memory.  Sure, I could reduce all my textures, remove models, clutter and target 1080p but I'm a quality junky... and I just don't want to release a product that doesn't meet my standards.  Even though the plan is to offer it for free, I want to release something I can be proud of... or as proud as one can be of making a porn game about milfs and taboo relationships.

So what's been done so far?  There are nearly 600 scenes mocked up, another 200 scenes that are basically ready to render, 8 finalized main characters, 10 secondary character prototypes and around 25 extras.  While a few of the main characters have been shown, none of those posts are of their final versions. Some have changed drastically while others are very similar to what has been revealed so far.  Miss Mandy and Betty for example have both changed only very slightly. 

Beyond rendering, the story/dialogue is coming along nicely with most plot lines thoroughly fleshed out and somewhere in the realm of 400 pages of dialogue that has been written at this point. 

There has been absolutely zero real work done in the game engine so far beyond learning the ropes and testing the general systems.

What kind of timeline are we looking at?  Well, as many know it's very difficult to put a time on when to expect a game to be done but I can say with certainty that it will not be within the next year.  There is so, so much left to do and I am only one boxx... with 8GB of VRAM holding me back.  If I'm able to get a Beta shipped by the end of 2024 I'll be happy with the progress.

Working on a sexy-sex visual novel game.

Have done a tonne of work over the last year.

Much left to do.

Progress limited by VRAM/money.

Late 2024 Beta target?

Until next time,

GB