Hi guys,How is everybody doing? I hope you all had an amazing week so far.
For us, the week started strong. By Wednesday afternoon all the animations were finally posed, so I moved on to integrating everything and started debugging the game. Unfortunately, as you know, one of my machines broke, which meant I had to pause rendering during the day a few times to fix scenes and sort out other things, so it mainly rendered overnight. But progress is progress.
To give you a better idea of where we are with the release, here's what the process looks like once all the scenes are done:
Check all renders for visual bugs like clipping and similar issues. ✅
Post-production work in Photoshop and Lightroom on all renders and animation frames. ✅
Integrate all renders and animations into the game. For the missing animations I use placeholders, so at the end I only need to swap in the final files. ✅
Make sure the game can be played without any errors that crash it. ✅
Send the game to our proofreader to go through the whole episode once again but this time in-game. 👈 We're here.
While I wait for him to finish I create the gallery images. 👈 We're here.
Once the game is back from proofreading, I go through it again — more carefully this time — and fix any remaining bugs caught during step 5. ❌
When the last animation finishes rendering, we swap out the placeholder, then I do one final pass to make sure nothing is broken.❌
So as you can see, we're really close, but there are still things that need to be done and simply can't be rushed. It may take a week, it may just as easily take a bit more. The moment the final animation is done rendering, it's just a matter of hours.
I really hope to release next week, but some animations will take longer than usual depending on the scene. Without getting too technical, scenes with a lot of shiny surfaces, bouncing light, wet skin, and so on take significantly longer to render, and some of our animations in those spots are 250–350 frames long.
That being said, I wish you all an amazing rest of the weekend, and I'll keep you updated. This will probably be the last weekly report before the update.
Bests,Jason
Who knows what's going on here, but one thing is for certain. Tris is in trouble.