dev-blog #33 - techDemo 0.7.1 and "Patreon Censored Version"

it's christmas time so what better opportunity there is for a new release, right? Right!

After all the struggles I went through prior to my hiatus I can finally show some new features for the game. Unfortunately Patreon changed a part of their ToS during that time which has a big impact on my game: the banning of incest and rape
this directly impacts on how I inteded this game to be and already lead to the demise of the scene that should have come with this update (the scenes concept was worked out way before Patreon changed their ToS).

Since I dont want to miss out on the opportunities and chances Patreon offers I will adapt my game accordingly which means that you won't be able to have any sexual relations with your direct relatives anymore or be able to perform violent rape acts on any other character in the game, as long as you play the "Patreon Censored Version". These changes will take effect with the next release of TechDemo 0.8 as the development of 0.7.1 was already beyond adaptability from coding side.

but now on to the good stuff, whats new in TechDemo 0.7.1:

• BGM integration
  there are now 20 music tracks included in the download that will loop as background music during the game. you can adapt the volume of it to your needs or silence it completely via the Settings menu
  
  
• Foto Mode
  a big part of the final game will be the ability to snap pictures of candid moments either for your own pleasure, leverage or as trading objects with other NPCs. You can test it out in the Shower Scene
  
  
• new Smartphone UI
  originally the Smartphone was inteded to be just "another" menu where you can take a look at the pictures you took in the Foto Mode but then I decided to make it more versatile and replace the quick menu with it. the Smartphone now houses all existing menus and has room for those yet to come.
  
• Area Lockdown
  as many may have experienced: you could get stuck in school really easy. mainly due to the door and dialog system not set up to handle any other "encounter" outside the intended school time because the player should not be there any other time anyway. and now that system is finally in place to make sure nobody gets in to places at times they should not be there. (PS: who wants to be at school on weekend anyway, right?)
  
  
• New NPCs: Deon and Suki
  both, Deon and Suki, are classmates and can be found in the classroom during school time. for now they serve no other purpose than to fill up the place a little but they will get their share of interaction with the coming updates.
  
• file size optimization
  this might not sound too fancy at first but given the intended scope of my game it became clear for me that I might end up with a massively large game package if I keep the almost raw PNGs for my scenes. I did some tests with image optimization tools to find the sweet spot between file size and quality which lead to a overall file size decrease of ~70%. In the long run this will be vital to keep the games download size to an acceptable amount.

and of course many fixes and tweaks.

so what about that "Patreon Censored Version"?

good question that is! I had something in mind like a "patch" that will add in the content Patreon doesn't allow so they get the censored version on their page and anyone who wants to can get the patch from my blog. works like many of the "censored" games on steam that provide an extrenal patch to deliver content which is not tolerated by steam.
But I first need to adapt the backbone of the game engine to account for that change so it could not be added in a quick way to already have it in place for this update.

dev blog #32 - techDemo 0.7 release info and future plans

it's finally time to bring out the completely reworked techDemo 0.7!

20$+ Patrons can already get it here
10$ Patrons will follow on 16th and a
public release will be on 23rd of September


you can check out some of the changes here in the preview videos

apart from a complete UI overhaul the main part of the work on 0.7 was to completely rewrite the code for the new game engine GameMaker:Studio2

in the process of rebuilding the game from ground up I also rewrote many of the internal functions to improve on stability and future proofness for later updates

I completely changed the way that dialogs and "events" are handled
in previous versions it started to become a real mess because there was no clear hirarchy on what gets executed first and which element can influence or change another element

for example each dialog was stored in its own file and was activated or "called" either by an event or an interaction with an object (like another NPC) or by another dialog (yes... chained dialogs)
this turned out to be a lot of trouble because I lost track of who pokes whom really soon and there aren't even that many dialogs in the game yet

so I changed the way it works: dialogs are now stored in groups of the same (like all dialogs concerning the Ficus are in one file) and easily adressed via "flags" so instead of manipulating the dialog directly the game engine switches the state of the corresponding flag and when the player now interacts with something, that something checks its stored dialogs and compares them with the flags and if a flag and a dialog match, you get that dialog shown
this way it is much easiert to keep track of the whole mess and things like Mike bringing Tamara home after school can't happen anymore because Mike has other flags available than Lena so the dialog that triggers the scene with Tamara and Lena will only appear for Lena in the first place.

so in general a lot happened under the hood and not much on the visible side with this update but there will be another content update later this month right in time for the projects one year anniversary at the end of September!

what happened to Gemini?

Gemini is complete now, it has both CPUs and both GTX1080TIs on separate watercooling loops now and is running like a charm.
I already did some test renderings on it and also a little animation render test

that was especially awesome because I once did an animation render test with my older PC (dual GTX970) that was around 3 seconds long (25 frames/second) and had a resolution of 480p (853x480 pixel)
but that animation I rendered on Gemini is around 8 seconds long (also 25 frames/second) and has a resolution of 1080p (1920x1080 pixel) which is 4x the pixel count and twice the amount of frames

and it took Gemini around 5 hours to render all those 200 frames in 1080p which is roughly the same amount of time like my previous computer took for the 90 frames in 480p!

Patrons can get the original 1080p animation file here

speaking of Gemin, thats how she looks now in her final form:

I also designed and built a custom case just to fit that huge Z800 motherboard and both 360 radiators in it. That "little" DIY case project cost less than buying an equally sized computer case and I think it is a fitting case for this hacked together ex-Z800 workstation :D

btw the GPU loop never exceeded 40°C during that 5h render marathon having both 1080TIs running at max load so I'm very satisfied with its performance

so... we can has animations?

well... yes... kind of.
Rendering them is not an issue anymore and I am more than willing to spend render time on animations!
BUT: I need to find a way to integrate animated content into the game that does not consist of loading 200 images in 720p into your RAM for a short fucking loop
I don't know why but GM:S2 still does not support media files natively so I need to find a script or plugin that allows me to add, play back and control media files (like webm) easily so I can pre-fab the animation files as single media files and then just inject them into the scenes or dialogs when needed
this sounds more than doable so I'm confident that I will find a way to add animated content

ok, whats next?

well, as already mentioned there will be another update this month delivering content
this will include the "drunk dad" scene with Lena and Steve and some other content I'm not going to spoil yet :P

dev blog #31 - techDemo 0.6.3 public release and big news

it's time again for a public release!
techDemo 0.6.3 is here and you can get it from the download section.

I fixed some bugs regarding the job minigame so it is now possible to work more than once per day (but not at evening or night)

to trigger the new scene with Candice and Lena (30 CGI) you first need to pay Candice for a show (at the left pole) and then offer Mercedes your help so you get access to the backroom area where you need to talk to Candice to start the scene!

and now onto some news on techDemo 0.7:

I feel like repeating this over and over but development for 0.7 is progressing well and steady.
If nothing major happens to slow me down I think I can finish the transition finally at the end of this month.

Some of the "visible" updates can be seen in these preview videos while other things like game engine and backbone changes of the game are not visible to the users eye and more of changes to the code.






now besides the progress of Twin Star I also launched a new side project called:

Project Gemini:

what's that one might ask. Project Gemini is the upgrade project for my render PC.
As I already announced on Patreon, I plan to upgrade the current render PC with some new hardware, including the new powerhouse GTX 1080 Ti and other hardware.

The upgrade process will be divided into several phases containing different steps of hardware additions. This is mainly due to the current Patreon support level where I have to save up some months before I can make the hardware purchases.

Phase I:
originally I intended to buy one GTX1080Ti in this phase but I figured since I already have a GTX1070 it would be better to swap phases and leave the GTX 1080Ti for later.
Instead it's time to upgrade the backbone of the render PC:

The motherboard will be a server grade dual socket motherboard from a HP Z800 Workstation housing two hexa-core Xeon X5650 processors (6x 2.66 GHz at 3.06GHz boost) giving me a total of 12 cores and 24 threads to work with!
For the start each CPU gets 12GB of ECC server RAM which will be upgraded later to 24GB for each CPU (48GB in total)

The Z800 motherboard was the optimal choice in terms of dual socket motherboards that also provide 2 slots for graphics cards which doesn't cost a small fortune.
A more modern LGA2011-3 dual socket motherboard would cost 2x or 3x the price of the Z800 and one Xeon would cost more than this whole Phase in total. That's why LGA1366.

With an additional 1000W 80+ Gold powersupply this hardware cost around 700$ which is less than the original price of one X5650 when they were released in 2010.
But why this old hardware? Because it is still good and incredible cheap to get!

So what next?
Well first off I need to wait for the parts to arrive over the next weeks and when everything is assembled and functional I can start to render on Gemini instead :)

and then?
depends on how well Gemini works with the installed hardware.
It might be necessary to optimize the CPU cooling first which will result in both CPUs getting watercooled (because those 6-core Xeons get HOT).

Additional 24GB of ECC server RAM are also planned so each CPU has 4GB per core available.

And not to forget the planned dual GTX 1080 Ti that will get watercooled too at some point in the whole upgrade phase.

The watercooling is an essential part of the whole project because both CPU and GPU have clock boost when sufficiently cooled.
The Xeon will boost from 2.66GHz to 3.06GHz without manual overclocking and same goes for the 1080 Ti's as they will also auto-boost.

Watercooling is also way more quiet than pure air cooling with fans as you need less fans to cool the water down as if you would need to "blow" the air on heatsinks on the components directly.
And quiet is what i need! I don't have the room space to put Gemini anywhere else than the room where I work and that's why I will optimize it for beeing as quiet as possible too.

dev blog #30 - bring some order into that chaos

this is just a small update on the progression of 0.7.
Today I had a big breakthrough regarding how to prevent fuck-ups like the mess currently in 0.6.x

as I wrote in a previous blog post, the way I handled dialogs and events was kind of chaotic

this resulted in problems like NPC not responding to you anymore (Mercedes stops giving you job offers after the first round) or responding to you despite they should not (Tamara not rejecting Mike's "learn together" invitation)

initially I thought the system I came up with was future proof but after adding only a handful of interactions with the NPCs and objects it turned out to be more of a "wild west" situation than a clean and structured handling of tasks.
major problem here is that everything could interact and manipulate everything

(simplyfied diagram of the chaos :P )
dialogs could start events or manipulate NPCs directly and events on the other side could do the same which resulted in me loosing track of "who poked whom"
this is a problem especially in "content related" dialogs that should only trigger on certain occasions or with certain NPC so to fight this chaos I came up with a more "centralized" manner of handling dialogs:

events now no longer activate or manipulate dialogs directly. instead they change the state of the "dialog giving" object (NPC, container, door, etc) and based on that the dialog to be displayed is selected which will lead to a more manageable way of interaction because now there is only one place where a dialog trigger can be manipulated

also, instead of letting the timekeeper handle content related dialogs (daily recurring stuff like jobs, school, etc) now each NPC and other objects handle that themselves because that also was another source of problem
keeping the trigger control in one place (on the object that gets interacted with) should eliminate the current state of lost overview, just like the saying "too many cooks spoil the broth"

dev blog #29 - techDemo 0.6.2 - public release and some info on 0.7

the small techDemo 0.6.2 update is now available for the public!
get it from the download section or any of the various mirros on Patreon

you can trigger the new scene only as Lena (for now) when you talk to Tamara after class and invite her over to "learn together"

"that's all after one month of waiting?" you might think now but to be honest I almost decided to not spend time on rendering this month because programming takes up so much time right now.

as I already said in the previous blog entry, I am hard at work getting the game up to the new software version so spending over a week for rendering the scene was a lot of time I did not spend on code.

I will do the same for this month too so don't expect any changes on release schedule or content yet.

The next update will be techDemo 0.6.3 and it will include another new scene that will most likely show Lena and Tamara together (the poll on that is still on for some more days if you want to have a vote on that)

so let me repeat what I already wrote on Patreon:

Progress on 0.7:

so I was rather quiet here and on my blog over the past month (compared to previous months) and I feel like I need to give at least a little bit of update on the progress of techDemo 0.7

in the recent update 0.6.2 there was only a new scene added and nothing new in terms of functions or gameplay features.

also some of the major bugs are still not fixed (mainly problems at the stripclub) and there is only one reason to that:

there will be no more code changes in the 0.6.x versions of the game because all the time I currently spend on coding goes into 0.7.

for those who did not read the previous long post on my dev-blog  on that matter, here is a quick summary:
the game engine is completely self-built from scratch and some code turned out to be not as practical as anticipated in the long run.

and the software I use to make the game (GameMaker:Studio) got a new enhanced and improved version with new features that can help me in development (GameMaker:Studio2).

initially I did not want to change to the new software version because these switches always come hand in hand with a major re-work of the code because many parts of it will not work the same way as in the previous version.

but since I already needed to re-work parts of my code to fix the problems in 0.6 I finally decided to make the transition to the new GameMaker:Studio2

and that's what is currently going on: I re-work some 5 months worth of code to run at the new software version and at the same time improving my own code to a more stable and less complex way.

but since this is almost entirely game engine and framework related work it is hard to "show" the progress because the game looks almost the same anyway with only some minor visual changes like the new quick menu I showcased in the video


so bear with me a little longer until I finish the transition to GM:S2 for the new techDemo 0.7.
once 0.7 is done there will be regular gameplay mechanics updates and bug fixes again because the current state of the game is by far not what it is intended to be ;)

dev blog #28 - techDemo 0.6.1 public release and what's next

the techDemo 0.6.1 is now available for the public!

go check it out in the download section or here

if you haven't read it yet, here is an overview of what's new in this release

now that the public release is done I can completely focus on the next steps of the project.
the mess I made with 0.6 is still a big concern for me so I spent the last week figuring out how to minimize/avoid this to happen again later in development.

the main problem really was and still is the overly complex dialog/event system that grew with the project over the past techDemo updates. it worked as long as the game was rather "small" but it now already showed its limits on how it will perform once the game gets more complex with story line and missions and all the "fun" stuff a game is made of.

so I put a stop to all "new" features development and will now focus on fixing this issue as my top priority! this means that there will be no techDemo 0.7 until I figured out a better way for the dialog/event system.

in the meantime I will still release new scenes for techDemo 0.6 as I already announced here so you guys get something new to look at! but there won't be any new gameplay features until 0.7 is ready.

I will now go a bit into details on what I already figured out over the past week so if you are not interested in the "development" aspect of the game you can stop reading here (and go get that new release! NOW!)

probably the biggest decision I already made in the past week was to step up to the new version of GameMaker Studio!
the latest version, GameMaker Stuido 2, has some very neat new features that can help me out a lot with the development of Twin Star.

originally I didn't want to switch software during the development of TwinStar because moving from one release to a new release of GameMaker had many issues in the past which almost always requiered a partial re-work of the project in question.

BUT: since I already have to re-work a good portion of the game to fix the dialog/event issues I figured... meh... why not switch to GMS:2 in the process to profit from the awesome new features it has over GMS:1.

and so far I already encountered the anticipated problems... a lot.
for starters the advertised "easy import from GMS:1 project into GMS:2" didn't work...at all...
but I already expected that so it was not a surprise (I would've been surprised if it had worked as intended!)

but what I also tried out right away were some of the new features I put a lot of hope into helping me in development.
to list the most anticipated:

• new room editor:
  with the "layered" room editor making new "areas" for the game will be a hell lot easier compared to GMS:1
  I already toyed around with it and I am very pleased with the performance of this new feature
   
• auto-tilesets and tileset brushes
  now that's something most RPGMaker developers are familiar with and love.
  and I too was very happy when this feature was announced for GMS:2 as it makes development of game worlds much much easier.

one could now say "well duh, why don't you use RPGM in the first place then?!" which I can only answere with: it was the only advantage of RPGM over GMS while GMS was way more customizeable and versatile if you know how to programm.
but I'm not going into further details about the pro and cons of either development software as I am commited to GMS:2 entirely :D

so apart from these 2 very nice new features there are many more minor improvements over GMS:1 which I'm not going to list here

so what I can say now after working for a week with the new tool is: once you get used to it's new interface it is way more powerful than the previous version!

ok, enough now with licking YoYo Games balls and on to some more infos on how the progress of the game now stands:

since the import of the GMS:1 project file failed I literally have to build the game engine from scratch in GMS:2. at first this might sound like a horrible thing to do regarding the fact that the GMS:1 project is worth 4 months of development but it's not that bad at all.

while it does take some effort to re-build it I don't have to entirely start from 0 as most of the "logic" in the existing code still applies to the GMS:2 environment and I don't have to figure out how stuff works again. so while I can re-use 80% of my existing code I still have to make some improvements to existing things otherwise the whole transition from GMS:1 to GMS:2 would make no sense at all.

so there are already 3 things I changed for the 0.7 build:

1. "true" portable mode
   the portable (or non-installation) deployment of the game started with techDemo 0.4 but still caused some problems with some windows users.
   due to the nature of GMS and how it handles "host environment" it is almost impossible for developers to gain access to the filesystem of the OS the game is running at (they call it sandboxing)
   
   so the only options to "save" game data to is either the %appdata% directory or the directory the game is launched from.
   
   and up until now my game was using the %appdata% for savegames and temporary file storage which caused problems when you run the game on a restricted user account or from certain types of external storages or drives.
   
   so in order to eliminate this problem the new 0.7 will handle ALL file storage in its own directory like a portable application should.
   
   a benefit from this new approach is also the easier patching capabilites which allows me to add content to a game version without you having to download the whole package again but just add the new content instead.
    
2. screen resolution/aspect ratio handling
   
   
   
   now this is something I had discarded until not long ago since resolution handling in GMS:1 is a bitch.
   
   but GMS:2 changed some things regarding this matter so since I rebuild the game engine I also decided to add support for multiple screen resolutions. I took the "January 2017" list of the Steam Hardware Survey as available options.
   
   and there is no fullscreen mode anymore as GMS:2 also has the same flaws as GMS:1 regarding that so I ditched it in favor for the now selectable resolutions (up to 3840x2160).
     
3. improved internal data handling
   now this change is for preparing for the improvements I have to do to deal with the growing complexity of the dialog/event system and the still to come mission and story system.
   
   apart from switching to DS_maps and grids for storing game data instead of arrays I also need to find a better and more manageable way to handle the dialog/event files
   
   for easier editing I stored all the text and data in external text files (which I can also edit outside of GMS) that got loaded into the game when needed but this approach prove very complex because despite me maintaining a summary list of the textfiles I quickly lost track on what textfile contains what and which textfile can affect what in the game.
   
   now while it is very common to store dialog and text this way I think my approch of it was not very sophisticated so I'm going to work on that too
   

dev blog #27 - what a mess ....

so what happened with the release of techDemo 0.6?
only the 20$+ Patrons know it but I did some really bad quality checking before I released the early access version for them....

in short, there were several game breaking bugs in this release which forced me to release a bunch of short term hotfixes until I could re-compile everything into a new techDemo 0.6.1 version.

There is no excuse for that but I feel the need to give at least some explanation on how that happened and what I'm going to do about it in the future to minimize the chances of this kind of fuckup happening again.

To be clear: bugs can happen in every game development stage and release.

that said I'm going to give a little insight of my development process and what lead to the current situation.
If you don't care about details and just want the redemption gift scroll to the end of the page ;)

so, what happened?

what you are looking at here is my "relationship-diagram" for my events. Events are handling certain things in the game. they add or remove dialog options, place or move NPCs, modify the open/close status of doors etc etc.
in short, events are what make the game interactive.
each event has its unique ID and events can also call other events.

and here is where it gets tricky:
until now I only had a simple excel sheet where I kept a list of event IDs with a short description of what that event does. nowhere was noted the exact actions that event would start or which things it would modify.

this lack of detail resulted in a big messy bunch of numbers the bigger the game got. and to be honest the game is not very big at all so it also came a bit surprising for myself that my ID system already hit its limits at this stage of development.

so I sat down today and started to bring some clearance into the ID system. I made this diagram to have a visual aid on which event causes what. right now I only listed the events that get called either by the "new game event" E0 or the character related events E1 (Mike) and E2 (Lena).

those events are also embedded in the "timeKeeper" which controls the day and time related events so things like scenes and other time related things "happen"
.... or don't as it was the case now with 0.6!

because one of the events embedded as an "evening" event also triggered a "time increase by 1" it caused the game to skip "night" time and thus preventing the player from starting the brand new scene at "night"

due to the lack of detail on my ID excel sheet I simply overlooked it and unfortunately as it already was, the last minute changes I made to the game directly involved that said event...
and I did not test everything again that had worked previously because I was already two days behind schedule for other coding problem reasons....

so in order to minimize the chance of such fuckups I started to keep track of all the events in a much more detailed way.
a similar ID system is in place for all the dialogs in the game and dialogs can call events and the other way round. and it is a big messy pile of numbers already and not only once I had the feeling of getting lost in my own IDs....

BUT with the now visual diagram overview I'm going to maintain from now on I'm positive that I can keep those kind of problems under control.
it does also mean that I have to put even more time into "project management" as I already had to but that's how it is with such projects anyway.

so now for the gift:
all 20$+ Patrons will get access to a special archive that I will upload soon. this archive contains all the CGI that I rendered for the Mom/Dad scene. I rendered a total of  119 images in 1920x1080 and only 64 of these made it into the final scene reduced to 1280x720.

dev blog #26 - new techDemo 0.6

the wait is over! techDemo 0.6 is available now to all T4 and T5 Patrons

so what is new in this release?

• new Scene at home
  
  
  there is a new scene available for both characters at night when they walk down the stairs from the upper floor at home (100% chance for now)
  includes 2 new characters, Mom (Susan) and Dad (Steve) with 64 CGI rendered images with hardcore elements.
   
• new area: The Rear End
  the stripclub "The Rear End" is the first of many locations where you can earn money by working different jobs (mini-games)
  the first available job is a waitress styled game where you have to collect orders from customers and then serve them the drink in time to get extra money. The mini-game is skipable but then you will only get the regular wage and no extra money.
   
• 4 new characters!
  1) Tamara
  
  
  she is the same age as Lena and Mike and a classmate of them. you can find her in the classroom
  
  2) Candice
  
  
  she is the resident stripper at "The Rear End" and can perform for you if you can afford her.
  
  3) Konstantin
  
  
  this mountain of muscles is the bouncer at "The Rear End" and will kick you out face first if you anger him or Candice.
  
  4) Mercedes
  
  
  she is the manager of "The Rear End" and gives you the job if you ask her.
    
• new Scene at The Rear End
  you can pay Candice to perform a sexy show for you at "The Rear End".
  includes the new character Candice and 42 CGI rendered images (just a sexy show for now, will get expanded by more options later)
   
• "Money Maker" system
  as the name implies: you can now earn and spend money on items/activities
  the list of possibilities will expand in the future so for now the only way to earn money is the job at "The Rear End" and the only thing you can spend it on is the performance of Candice
  for now!
   
• "Friendship" system
  
  with this update you can already increase your friendship level with some of the characters by complimenting them. this will also get expanded with new content in the future
   
• Skill Books
  
  a second way to increase your skill points outside of class are skill books in various levels.
  for now there is only one skill book for Engineering in Ms. Adams desk in the classroom.
   
• Town Map
  
  the new way of traveling to various locations is the townmap that you can enter by going out the front door of your home. right now only two locations exist in the game (School, The Rear End) but I already placed the markers for many of the other locations that will get added to the game.
   
• many more tweaks and fixes
   

as always the T3 Patrons will get access to this release in one week from on 01/31/17

and the public release is on 02/07/17 !

dev blog #25 - new GTX1070

the latest render problems forced me to find a short term solution.
As already explained my GTX970s 3.5GB VRAM was not enough anymore to support the high-quality renders for the game.

To sort out this problem I just installed a brand new GTX1070 from ASUS that has 8GB of VRAM.

That sounded easier than it actually was...

due to the bulky flexible tubing layout of my already installed watercooled GTX970s it was nearly impossible to fit in the 3rd GPU...

since my motherboard (ASUS Maximus VI Hero) has 3 PCI-E slots it should be possible to run all 3 cards...
BUT: only the top slot is PCI-E 3.0 x16 and the other two are 2.0 with x8 and x4
so the plan was to put the better card (GTX1070) in that x16 slot...

well... that plan didn't work out that well because the watercooling parts were in the way of the bulky shroud of the 1070 :/

so I tried to place it in the middle slot...same problem and the backplate of the lower 970 would obstruct the fans of the 1070...damn

the bottom slot was no option either for the same reasons....

so...how to mount a card if it fits nowhere? ZIP-TIES!
I KNOW! that's not the proper way to mount a GTX1070 but what should I do?
it's not stupid if it works...right?!

next problem after mounting it was that my PC somehow wouldn't start anymore with all 3 cards installed... so... I had to take one of the 970s out :(

not the easiest when it's hooked to a full watercooling circuit... what a mess!

so...did it pay off at all? YES!
until now every render that required more than 3.4GB of VRAM was handled by my poor little CPU alone without the support of any of the two GTX970.
So all my combined 3k+ CUDA cores where no use to me as the cards refused to work....

But with the larger 8GB VRAM of the GTX1070 now even my GTX970 joins in with its CUDA cores even tho it technically has not enough VRAM ... the two sided medal of GPU VRAM.... they don't add up if you have two cards with 3.5GB (nope, not 7GB) but they start to share their bigger VRAM with lesser equipped cards in the render process :)

so the same render that took my CPU alone 7 minutes to get 12% done took my GPUs and CPU combined extremely less time for the same progress (as it should be!)

well...after struggling with the new card for the last 3h I can finally continue work on the scenes for the next update... yay!

dev blog #24 - the bottleneck is real!

with the public release of techDemo 0.5 right around the corner I'm already working hard on the next update.

Aside from the bigger coding parts I scheduled for the next release there will also be many new CGI and two new scenes to go along with the new NPCs that get added too. You can check out the new "Characters" page I just created where you can find all the NPCs.

So the biggest new features for techDemo 0.6 will be:

• "Moneymaker" update
  first part of the economy system is the "Moneymaker" update that allows you to earn money in various ways to spend later on other things
   
• new area "The Rear End" (Stripclub)
  as part of the "Moneymaker" update this area will allow you to earn money by doing different jobs after school or on weekends
   
• "Friendship" system
  in order to form any sort of relationship with others you need to increase your friendship status with them. this update handles the gain and loss of friendship status points for NPCs you already unlocked in your "Journal" (e.g. angering Ms. Adams by "improving" your art skills on the class's chalkboard has an effect now)
  
   
• 2 new scenes
  yes you heard right, there will be TWO new scenes in this update!
  one scene is related to the stripclub and the other one to Mom & Dad
   
• Navigation 2.0
  improvements/changes to the keyboard/mouse navigation and interaction with things.
  interactable objects/NPC are now only accessible from designated sides (e.g. you can't open the fridge from the side anymore, only from the front). This allows "obstructable" containers like the teachers desk where you only get access to if Ms. Adams is not "blocking" it. The "activation" of things not directly in front of you is also possible now
  
   

this list only covers the big main features and there are many more small and minor tweaks and changes to come.

and while working on parts of the new scenes I hit the GPU bottleneck once again :/

what you can see in this screenshot:
my CPU (4 cores @ 4GHz) is at 100% load while both GTX970 sit idle with their combined 3220 CUDA cores that are made for rendering jobs. this is due to the large size of the high-res textures used for the rendering process and the "small" 3.5GB VRAM of the GTX970... it simply doesn't fit into their VRAM so they won't help out with rendering at all.

this really starts to slow down my workflow so I had to do something about it. The original plan was to save up enough money (via Patreon) to be able to buy a new Nvidia Titan X that has a whopping 12GB of VRAM which should be enough for a long time until I would hit that bottleneck again.

BUT! since I can't even render that 2 character scene in a reasonable quality and time already I had to improvise with a short term solution. This short term solution is a new GTX1070 with 8GB of VRAM to keep me on track for a little longer so I don't have to sacrifice quality in order to push out new CGI! It should arrive in the next few days (according to tracking) so I can keep working on the new scenes :)

dev blog #23 - into the new year!

2016 

... what a year! As pretty much everybody else too I had my fair share of unpleasant moments this year but I'm happy to say that I can end it on a high note!

Big thank you to all my supporters who made it possible for me to advance the games development in very big steps! You guys are awesome!

When I started the development of the game I didn't think that I would have such a big support coming from the community this early on. The game is in development since October now which is not for very long at all.
In the beginning I didn't think the interest in it would be that high either but as statistics on my blog and Patreon show: you guys want it!
Ranging from an average of 300-600 hits every day to a recent peak of 3.700 hits on my blog alone on the 25th of December I can assume that the interest indeed is high.

And the game isn't even what it's going to be at all yet. Development just scratched the surface of what's going to come and I can assure you that my motivation is very high to deliver you guys even more quality! Despite the actual lack of real content I'm very thankful to all of the Patrons who decided to support me already with a pledge and I won't let you down.

That said, the amount of people who apparently can't or don't want to understand that development of a custom built game engine takes some time is too high but I won't let them drag me down with their impatience or harsh comments!

If you have not checked it out yet I recommend a look at the roadmap where you can see the development schedule and what's going to come (in the next update or later).
My main objective is still to finish up the game engine as soon as possible so I can start pumping out real game content for you. Therefore I have to focus on game engine development critical tasks more than on the creation of new scenes or characters. But that doesn't mean I'll skip those important things either and you can expect new scenes in every update like I did in the previous updates.

Speaking of updates: my plan is to have the game engine "finished" (it won't be really finished until the full game is done) to a point that all the big and gameplay critical features are implemented in around 2-3 Months at latest! (not making any promises here! only promise I can make is that I'll work as hard on this goal as possible)

Because... let's face it: you guys want them boobies!
and you will get them for sure! and they will be glorious! and I'm sure you're going to have as much fun with them as I had creating them for you.

And regarding them boobies: there are many more female characters coming to the game step by step who will be available for action at one point too. But that doesn't force you to engage with them as the main story line will still be evolving around the twins and their relationship progress with each other. The other girls will just be eye candy to spice up the game. And yes... more guys are coming too.

So aside from game engine "milestones" I also updated the "Goals" section on Patreon because I ran into several bottlenecks while rendering the high quality CGI for the game.
While I can render in a somewhat fast speed with my current 2 year old setup (i7-4790k 4x4GHz, 32GB DDR3-1600, 2x GTX970, all components watercooled) rendering one image in 720p takes between 30 minutes and 6h. The main bottleneck here is the "small" memory of the GTX970 (3.5 GB) which limits me to CGI with only 2 characters in it because the high quality textures take up alot of that. I couldn't render the "new year 2017" image as one image with all 6 of my current characters in it because that would've needed 7GB of graphics RAM. To render it I rendered each character separate and combined the images afterwards which took me some time. With one or two better graphics cards this bottleneck can be eliminated but the cards I have in mind are very expensive Nvidia Titan X Pascal (but the best bang for your bucks).

So where's all this tech bla bla leading to?
Well... I formed a 3-step computer hardware upgrade plan that (if Patreon support keeps being that awesome) will be leading to better hardware for my render PC and thus faster render times. This ultimately leads to faster update cycles for new scenes and other CGI at your end.

So the most needed hardware upgrade would be one Nvidia Titan X Pascal that would join my two existing GTX970 (I have a spare slot on my motherboard, yay) and that's the goal for upgrade step 1.
The other steps are detailed on my Patreon page so check them out (at the goals section) if you like to know more on that topic.

But enough already with this tech gibberish that doesn't really concern your end of the line!

What's in store for you over the next months? Well I plan to host more polls to give my awesome supporters the opportunity to participate in the creation of the game more! Like the currently active poll you will be able to decide in things like new areas, outfits, characters or even story lines (once ready). In addition I will also continue to post high-res and regular concept and preview renders as I already did this year.

To start fresh into the new year I assembled a free pack of wallpapers that everybody can download. It includes the "new year 2017" image and "single" images for each character without any watermarks... all in 4k resolution (3840x2160) so you can downsize them to whatever resolution you like.

LINK: Mega.nz

PREVIEWS:

New Year 2017

tldr; happy new year everybody!

dev blog #22 - new techDemo 0.5 released

and here it is!
the next techDemo 05. version is ready just in time as a little christmas present!

• you can play as Lena now!
  you can do almost everything that Mike could do already (except the Mike specific scenes of course)
  
  
   
• new scene (when playing as Lena)
  added a new scene with 25 CGI rendered images with hardcore elements that you can trigger every night at Mikes door (for now)
  
  
   
• new character: Ms. Adams hot young class Teacher of Mike (and Lena for now, she will get a handsome male teacher later)
  
  
   
• new area: School
  on weekdays you have to go to school from morning till afternoon where you can select one of your skills that gets leveld during "class" with the
  
  
   
• skill learning system
  attending class increases your skill points by 25 and once it reaches 100 points that skill goes up one level (skills still have no effect for now)
  
   
• new improved inventory
  I re-wrote the inventory system for better performance and to integrate "usable items" for later updates
  
  
   
• formatted dialog text
  improved the dialog text render engine to be able to show different formatted text in the same line (e.g. thinking, bold text, etc)
  
  
   
• many bugfixes and tweaks!
   

all 20$+ Patrons should check their PM inbox for the download link!
10$ Patrons will get access on 31st December and then the public release will be the 7th January 2017

Poll #1 - new area

the development schedule for techDemo 0.6 is set and includes the implementation of the "money system".
this includes a new area where you can actually earn money.

but instead of me deciding what area gets added next I would like to give you, my awesome supporters, the opportunity to cast a vote for one of the following new areas:

• The Roadhouse (Restaurant)
  you can work here to earn some money after school or on weekends
  Lena/Mike: Waitress/Waiter
  the skill "Charisma" will affect how much extra tips you get each shift
  Lena: Cooking
  the skill "Creativity" will affect how much extra wage you get

• The Rear End (Stripclub)
  you can work here to earn some money after school or on weekends
  Lena: Bar/Waitress
  the skill "Charisma" will affect how much extra tips you get each shift
  Mike: Bouncer
  the skill "Strength" will affect how much you get paid

• Wranglers (Gas Station/Mechanic)
  you can work here to earn some money after school or on weekends
  Lena/Mike: Cashier
  the skill "Charisma" will affect how much extra tips you get each shift
  Mike: Mechanic
  the skill "Engineering" will affect how much extra wage you get

the poll will be active until the public release of techDemo 0.5 which is scheduled for 01/07/17

the poll winner will be implemented first! that also means that the other areas will be implemented at a later point too

cast your vote here

dev blog #21 - new techDemo in sight

that was a long week of coding and rendering! the to-do list for the next version is getting shorter and shorter with more and more things checked as "done".

just some more fixes and tweaks to the existing "content" and the release is good to go live!
the planned release date for 20$ Patron early access is the 24th Decemeber and after one week the 10$ Patrons will get access on the 31st.

Public release date for techDemo 0.5 is going to be the 7th January 2017!

I'll post a summary of added/changed/fixed features on release day as usual so stay tuned until then.

dev blog #20 - new Character

thanks to the awesome Patron support this month I was able to buy new character assets and environment assets.
and since development progressed very well too I decided to add a new character already in techDemo 0.5!

meet Ms. Adams: the young, single homeroom teacher of Mike

there wont bey any scene with her yet but some dialogs.

the biggest update would be the implementation of the skill system that lets you level your skills at school. check out a preview video here



as you can see there will also be a new area you can travel to: the school
(although in a very unfinished temporary state, there will be many more rooms later)

every school day you can increase the points on one of your skills by 25 points (1/4th).
Another way of getting your skills higher will be reading skill books. on their implementation I will work next in combination with other "usable" items.

Patrons can expect a first concept render of the new scene very soon to!

Twin Star - techDemo 0.4 - public release

it's finally here for the public!

get it from the download link

if you haven't already checked it, find more details in the previous blog post here

dev blog #19

with the public release of techDemo 0.4 right around the corner I'm already busy working on the new features for techDemo 0.5!

some new things are already completed, like the new and improved inventory. due to the way the inventory was "generated" until now there have been some bugs and complications regarding things like item drag&drop and consistent control handling. so I decided to completely re-write the code for the inventory handling which lead to a new layout and the improvement of the inventory functionality.

as you can see in this screenshot the "Fridge" inventory is already one of the new smaller inventory types. The item description box got moved from the bottom of each inventory to one single box to the left side with better readability (also featuring the new improved text engine with formattable text).

What you also see is a new item: a skill book
depending on the item type you can "use" some of them right out of "My Inventory" by clicking the action button on the left ("read it" in case of a skill book)

what's also ready to show off? character selection!

it's working, and the integration into the save/load system is also finished. you can only select the character when starting a new game and it is not planned to ever switch between characters midgame! You can expect playing either of them to be a separate experience as the play style of both of them will be a different one.

as it might not look like much the background work of these "simple looking" upgrades took some time and there is still more to come for the new version that is not just bugfixing.

the next big part on my list right now is the skill system that will allow for leveling your skills by different ways. major part of  leveling a skill will be attending a certain class at school (which will be added in this update too). other ways will be things like "skill books" that also increase your skill level by a defined amount of EXP.
Yes that's right, you won't level skills as a whole but step-by-step with increasing the experience bar of that skill.

in addition there will be added many more things to do ingame apart from jerking off into a plant!
so let me wrap up this blog entry and get back to work so I can keep the planned release date around the last week of December (for early access).

also, as successful as this month was for my patreon campaign, I have to rethink the way I grant rewards. the amount of fraud and false patrons was too high so I will change the way patrons get access!

dev blog #18 - the road ahead

techDemo 0.4 is released for early access patrons for some days now and I started to think about what's going to come in the next update.

while I have a list of things and ideas I want to put into the game it is nothing I would share online because it's unorganized and full of comments for myself.
that's why I decided to setup a public roadmap for the game so you guys can check anytime what's getting worked on and what's going to come later.

find the roadmap here on trello
there is also a link on the top right menu of my blog.

this roadmap is a general overview of things that I plan to put in the game and things that get worked on. you can filter the list for things like "game engine", "explicit content", etc or even the game version of the game, like "techDemo 0.4", "techDemo 0.5" and so on.
it is by far not a complete list so expect things to be added frequently.

other than that I already finished an advanced text display engine that will power the dialogs and scene texts and all major text blocks in the game from now on.
It allows for "formatted" text to be displayed as the GameMaker Studio text engine is not that versatile regarding multiple formats in one text.

here is a screenshot of what that means (oh and it's a preview for the new scene of 0.4):

until now there was only text with the same style for the dialogs and scenes but as you can see in the image: mikes "thoughts" are now displayed in italic font and the text can even have different colors in the same sentence.

so what else am I planning to add for 0.5?

well here is a quick summary of what you can expect for the next update that will be released near the end of December:

• Character selection - play as Mike or Lena
• more character background story/info
• +1 hardcore scene from Lena's POV
• "random conversation" upgrade to the dialog engine
• working skill system (level your skills by attending different school classes)
• +1 new map: school (in a very temporary layout for now)
   

this is going to be a bigger update to the game so I'll take more time for it than the last ones.

of course I already got some feedback from my early access Patrons regarding some bugs.
Bug hunting will be a big part of this update cycle again so expect things to get fixed too.

dev blog #17 - new techDemo 0.4

and here it is!
the next techDemo version is finally presentable

Twin Star - techDemo 0.4

the new major features are:

• Skill Menu
  
  
  
  the latest addition to the Journal menu is the skill menu that gives you an overview over your characters skill levels (duh)
  there is no background functionality to it yet other than a display function
  the effects of the skills are still temporary but probably won't change much in the future so you can already see where I'm going with them.
   
• Map Changer
  
  in order to travel around in the game world and visit other areas the "map changer" takes control of transition between the different areas that will be in the game.
  
  In addition I also expanded the house by another floor, the "Groundfloor" that you can reach by going downstairs over the newly added staircase next to the bathroom
  
  
  
  
  now that there is a "front door" you can also leave the house at "morning" on weekdays to go to school (not really, but it's a placeholder for the next update)
   
• new hardcore scene
  
  as already announced in some previews this update includes another new hardcore scene!
  
  
  
  
  for testing purpose this scene is available every "morning" at the bathroom door, just check it out.
   
• 'install-free'
  I changed the way the game gets deployed so from now on you don't need to install it anymore in the usual way!
  It comes as an extractable ZIP with 'pre-installed' game files and all you have to do is extract it anywhere you like (your external encrypted porn stache if you have one) and run the games .exe file
   

there have been of course many minor tweaks and a lot of bugfixes. for a more detailed overview check out the changelog page

Early Access

all qualified Patrons will get the download link in a PM in the next hour.
If you want to know more about early access check out the early access page

Public Release
the public release for the techDemo 0.4 will happen in two weeks from now on 4th of December!

dev blog #16

after the very successful public release of the techDemo 0.3 (over 3000 downloads in 2 days)  I'm happy to say that the release for 0.4 is almost here too!

Patrons can expect to get the early access by the end of next weekend (19-20 Nov) and then the public release for 0.4 will follow 14 days later.

so what happened lately in development?
well I hunted down many more bugs that popped up while implementing new functions for several reasons. the main bug infection came from code that was not very optimized from previous versions so it bugged out when I added new stuff.
But that's how it usually works, you fix a bug and add 3 new in the process!

Right now I'm busy furnishing the new area of the house "ground floor".
Transition from upstairs to ground floor is working very well already meaning that the "map changer" is ready. so there will be a new area in the update that comes after this one too (most likely the school).

here you can get a glimpse of the (yet unfinished) new area

that's all there is to show for now as I have previewed the other new function (skill menu) in the last dev blog post