Heya,
The song sequence took me a bit longer than anticipated, but I'm glad it's done. The good news is, I'm pretty happy with it. The bad news is, that it's better than the one from EP4! 😅
But don't worry, I won't be redoing the one from EP4. It's acceptable enough and if people even get to that point, they're likely already invested into the story anyway and won't mind it's a bit jankier (it's all pretty janky to be honest!). All of the episodes are important obviously, but as long as the first few look the way I think is acceptable, it's all good I guess.
-Technical blurbs-
Let's talk some numbers, as it's significantly increased the render count and let's you see why its taken a bit longer. The entire band scene from the moment of meeting them, the song, the hangout, and the potential intimate scene with Taylor, is now a total of 456 renders. That's roughly a third of the original render count for the old episode release. The original render count of these scenes were 212, so it has more than doubled! 😲
That said, the scenes themselves are not all that different in terms of pacing, development, and momentum (apart from Taylor's intimiate scene, as that has changed quite a bit... sex now, sex now!). There's a few improvements on the expression front, where often no words are spoken, but their faces say it all. I like this aspect of development, and I often neglected it in favour of spending less time, rushing, and releasing faster before.
I'm also pushing the limits of the animations/dynamic image style I use throughout the project. The way Renpy works by default is it predicts which images are about to be shown, and then loads them into memory for a smooth display and transition. It then unloads them to make room for the next batch. For the animations to play smoothly, it needs to pre-load a humongous amount of images (because I use a classic image flipping method, and not videos, so the visuals between scenes and animation is 100% the same and seamless). Because the amount of images are far too many and at 2K resolution, it doesn't pre-load them automatically, hence some animation may lag and freeze a bit. For the intimate scenes, it's not so bad, but it's terrible when you're trying to time it more accurately to a musical score. Instead of letting Renpy determine it by itself, I've manually forced to load the whole lot. I have no idea right now if this will cause issues for the average player yet, as it'll fill up your memory very rapidly this way, and many may have potato PC's. I'm sure Jeevant will run into issues when trying to make the final Android port because of this method. But we'll see!
Anyway, blah blah... damn, I make a good milker and nobody reads this shit anyway! 😈😈😈
An old VS new preview:
Although slightly behind where I wanted to be, the next weeks I should have a load of smaller scenes finished and a lot will turn green!
-Episode 5 development-
As I was doing these band scenes and realized how much time it takes me, I kinda came to the conclusion that I'm likely going to have to release episode 5 in multiple parts. The next episode is going to be huge for the band, and I want to be able to focus and absolutely nail it without getting worried about the complexity and length of the rest of the episode. So, what'll likely happen is that I'll release in two parts, with the first release being almost fully dedicated to the band, and then continuing with the MMA aspect in a part 2 release. Let me know how you feel about that!
Ezy ❤️