As pretty much every year, in January, I'm starting the year strong with a good flu. It was bound to happen. I hope to get rid of it during this weekend. Anyway, after almost 2 weeks of various festivities that crippled my productivity, it is time to get back to work.

Steam!

The game launched on Steam on January 2nd. You can find it here :

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2994790/Summer_Scent/

It's probably a bit too soon to talk about the results of that launch. The first day has been kind of mind-blowing, the second way slower and I do expect it to slow down even more in the coming days. We'll have to wait for the end of the month to get a clearer view. But so far, it's not looking that bad. I do dare to hope.

Of course, it's not going to sell itself. I still have to do my best to bring some traffic to the store page. And my promoting game is pretty weak. It will have to do nonetheless.

If you do buy and play the game on Steam, please write a review. Positive reviews will help a lot. Thank you!

Animations.

So... my first real animation is a failure. I gave that subject a lot of thoughts during this past week and I had a look at what other devs are doing in that matter. I've already said that I hate the typical 1-second loop and I aimed for something more ambitious right out of the bat. I now think that it was a mistake, given my skills and experience that are both nearing 0 when it comes to animation. So we're back to reevaluating our ambitions and our goals.

My first animation was 10 seconds long. That was stupidly long. Unless the player would have deliberately paused on that moment to enjoy it, he would have never seen it in it's entirety. And that brings me to reevaluate that 1-second loop thing. It's easier to do, faster to preview and render and if it's quickly annoying because of the repetitive nature of that kind of clip, it is likely that most players will leave it behind them before the repetitiveness really hits them, simply because they won't watch it for more than 10 seconds.

So... yeah. I'm gonna do what I hate, because in the end it's probably what fits the most.

I will finish rendering animation #2 however. But after that I will go for shorter and easier stuff.

Another major pro for shorter loops is that it will render way faster. And that means I should be able to considerably up the quality of the frame themselves which was something that was bothering me a lot.

I could render a 1 second loop in a bit less than 30 hours with the same level of quality as my stills. Which would be great.

The quick sum up :

• Day 6 Part 6 will contain 3 new scenes: scenes 30, 31, and 32.
• Day 6 Part 6 will contain 1 reworked scene: Day 2, scene 3.
• 5060 words of new content so far.
• 149 shots are planned, 75 are posed, 64 are rendered.
• 2 animations have been posed. 16 seconds, 540 frames.
• I'm currently posing scene 30.

You can follow my progress on this Trello board.

Thank you for your support!

The Naughty Captain