REC/REW update #11 - works on M2 line officially starting

So, here we go. Again. Nearly 40 days later than my self-imposed deadline, still... well, one of the good points of having no fanbase at all is, nobody is going to complain if I'm late =P!

Now this is going to be one hell of verbose, creepy "wall-of-text" post. To all those who simply do not want to waste their time reading my rants: I've started rolling out new content for my visual novel. Release of sSecond chapter begins today. This release includes A LOT of changes to the graphics, and some 5k words of brand new content (which is going to be more than ten times that figure in size).

Give it a try and don't forget to leave a feedback!

... Oh, and before I forget: happy Easter.

And now, for the "We few! We happy few!" part of the audience who wants to follow me in the depths of my delusions...

My initial target was an end-February release. Hell I even mentioned this goal in one of my silly teaser videos! To meet that deadline however I would have had to make rather big compromises. Simply put, I realized I did not want to come out with a visual novel which fell *that* far from the way I wanted it to look and feel. That's why I started a full review of the project, the results of which can be found in this new release.

FIRST HURDLE, THE CHARACTERS:

I had started working on a fine-tuning of my characters' sprites as early as late January. As the end February deadline approached I came to the conclusion, such activity had to be part of the next release. Previous sprites were subpar, not only visually but also in the logics behind the way I sorted and archived them.

This led to a lot of tinkering with IllusionSoft's CharaStudio. Let me say I'm totally happy with the outcome. You may not see much of an improvement from a strictly visual point of view, but - trust me - lots of things are happening under the hood. I've been able to build my own standard procedures and I can now work in a much more rational and streamlined way when it comes to sprites creation and sorting. Plus I moved from the existing JPEG/PNG mix to full-fledged WEBP file format.

SECOND HURDLE, THE BACKGROUNDS:

I wanted certain scenes to look and feel the way I envisioned them to, and this was not negotiable.

To meet my goal I needed something I did not have, as previous backgrounds were based on edited (mostly on a wing and a prayer) stock images. Yeah I could apply a few tweaks here and there to give the feel we were looking at the same scene from a different perspective however chapter 2's content required a degree of freedom stock images simply could not give me.

So I turned CharaStudio into my own personal background generator. At first I thought I would make entire maps, but then I opted for a much less time-consuming approach - I simply started adding walls and furniture and stuff directly into the main scene editor. You see, creating maps would have allowed me a better control over shadows and light sources, at the cost of learning Blender and Unity. That's something I might end up doing but only after the entire REC/REW project comes to its natural end. Then I might consider working on a set of maps for REC/REW... will be sort of a final icing on the cake (should that ever happen, that is).

If you play my game you might notice not all backgrounds have been reworked: certain locations are still depicted using edited stock images, while others (especially those were relevant game scenes take place) are built inside CharaStudio. That's simply because re-creating key landmarks of the city where the events take place would have been very time - consuming while giving very little added value.

To make moving between "Charastudio-generated backgrounds" and "stock images" a bit less jarring I also tinkered (A LOT!) with GIMP's filters and plugins, ultimately getting to a (sort of) standardized approach for stock image editing. All in all I like the results. The aesthetic might feel a bit more "generic" but I do prefer this over the previous one.

THIRD HURDLE, PUTTING EVERYTHING TOGETHER:

Yeah that sounded like the last and - by far - the least time consuming part of the job. Once everything was set up all I had to do was... well, put all the stuff inside the game script and make it work.

Easier said than done!

Since WEBP images are lighter than their PNG (and even JPEG!) counterparts I ended up building higher resolution versions of pretty much everything. That meant I had to add a bunch of lines in the script to shrink them and have them fit inside the screen. At the same time I found a clever way to work with all those cases where a different sprite should be shown depending on character's choices (think for example to Mika wearing her hair loose or in a ponytail) - more lines of code to be added into the fray. Finally I decided to merge certain sets of variables into arrays that - OK that's a lot of technobabble and I should stop. Just... well, there is a lot of stuff you might not get the chance to actually see with your eyes but - believe me - that also took time!

LAST HURDLE, BUILDING IN RENPY:

Yep, even this part took me some time. A couple evenings to be precise. And, it was mostly due to some kind of paranoid instinct of mine. I'm fully aware tools exist that allow people to extract pretty much everything (images, sound files, scripts... everything) from whatever I put online, still... you know, it's not that I'm maniacally jealous over my stuff - on the contrary I don't mind sharing the fruits of my hard work. I just want to know where it is going, so should you ever want the editable source of something - anything... well, all you have to do is ask. I'm more than willing to share. Just... yeah, not inside my official releases.

So, say I don't want my RPYfile to appear in the game directory. I found out there (obviously!!!!!) is a much smarter and easier way to achieve the same goal.

I also don't like the idea of having the original editable WEBP images within the game directory. Now many games made with Renpy have a mystery blackbox with a ".rpa" file extension. Turns out this is the easy way to achieve what I want. And again, it's just a couple lines of code away from me.

I ran a test build on Friday, found everything worked out smoothly and... eureka!

Last but not the least, the "optimized" web version of the game. As I said resolution of pretty much every piece of graphic is presently much more than the basic 1280x720 window the game runs in. To make the web version lighter (and hopefully more enjoyable - I've experienced some cases of lag during my test runs and I felt they might ruin the experience) I decided to create a dedicated version of every pic, shrunk to 1280x720. Thankfully there are ways to batch-process images!

This resulted in a nearly 30% reduction in the overall size of the web version. Might have fun at further improving that figure but right now that does not feel a priority (not anymore at least).

TO SUM IT UP!

It's been a though month... more than a month now that I think about it. I spent a lot of time making huge changes to my project, changes that will help me working in a much more streamlined and simple way. The results might not be visually impressive (I keep repeating I am no artist... And no, as much as I'd love to you're not going to see a Takeuchi's version of Mika) but - again, do trust me - that's not the only aspect you should consider when judging my work. As the game's developer I can tell you, these 40 days were an investment and not a waste.

As for this release: as I already said, it brings some 5k words of brand new content into the fray. All in all this second chapter is going to be in the range of 60k words so putting everything together will take a while.

This first chunk includes one of the four (three if you consider that one of them is sort of a prosecution of the previous one) sex scenes that will be present in REC/REW. Only chapter 2 will have them for... reasons, I'm sure you'll get them as new content is added. And, I've made a point to make them neither unreasonably long nor kinky - I did not have a nukige in mind back when I started this project and I don't have it in mind right now. Rather I want them to feel sweet, passionate and... yeah, playful (again, not in a kinky way =P).

Still, a NSFW flag has to be raised - ironically enough, I do think this is going to attract people rather than warding them off.

I'd say that's enough for today's wall-of-text. I had a lot of things to tell after such a long period of silence. Rest assured the project is alive and running - no matter how meagre the numbers might look, I'll keep working on REC/REW no matter what. I did not start this adventure with the number of downloads or web-playthroughs in my mind.

... Yeah, it's not a matter of how many people play my game. The whole point is, having something I can call "my game".

ps. it's late here and I'm quite tired - your son waking you up before 6AM even on Saturday is not helping. So please tolerate the lack of grammar & spelling check. I'm a bit too sleepy for that!