Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board.

With Scene 1's animation and still renderings complete, I'm taking a day or two break to recharge and prevent burnout. But don't worry, this pause won't slow our momentum. Scenes 1 through 5 are fully complete, with just 13 scenes remaining. I'm confident the development velocity will only increase from here!

✅ Last Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

• Main Menu Animation
  • Created a mesmerizing animation featuring Ambrose trapped in a forced dream-state by an off-screen Dremen Psion
  • The subtle glow of Psion eyes in the darkness creates an eerie, immersive atmosphere perfect for setting the game's tone
  • This will serve as our dynamic main menu background, and it is hauntingly beautiful
• Scene 1 Completion
  • Part 1 (NSFW video) - Undoubtably, some of my best work 🩵
  • Part 2 - 60 images posed and rendered at 4K

🛠️ Current Development

What I'm working on right now:

Scene 1 Final Touches

• Refining the musical composition for the remainder of the scene
  • Silent Catalyst - Listen on SoundCloud
  • Eternal Xana - Listen on SoundCloud
  • Creating minor musical composition for the final shot
• 4K Visual Experience
  • Significant upgrade to visual quality: Thanks to WEBP/WEBM's compression and EEVEE's rendering speed, Echoes of The Cataclysm will deliver a 4K experience (3840x2160) as our standard format, replacing the previous 1920x1080 approach.
  • File size examples (with 4K):

    Scene 1: 19.4 MB (images) + 89.4 MB (animation) Scene 2: 13.6 MB Scene 3: 55.5 MB Scene 4: 22.6 MB Scene 5: 21.9 MB

  • With 18 scenes planned for Chapter 1, the estimated 4K experience will be under 2GB 😻
• PRISM facility (scroll down for a sneak peek)
  • I've hit a small roadblock with the facility. I've got mental aesthetic of the look that I want but translating that into 3D is proving to be tedious and difficult. Getting the textures of the structure to look right has been the biggest hurdle.

🔮 Coming Soon

What I'm planning to work on next:

• Creating new character: Raven Delarosa

A jaded Emotiokinetic Psion with a sharp wit, Raven Delarosa operates on fringes of Neo Angeles' society, using her ability to manipulate feelings to subtly disrupt the system that failed her as an orphan.

⚙️ Technical Corner

The compositing workflow has been interesting to learn, which slowed progress down just for this scene. But in the future, this will actually be very helpful in the long run. The reason why it'll be helpful and only increase output speed, is because the Blender workflow now includes compositing/post-processing all in one. Here's what the new workflow is now:

• Create scene (create characters/lighting/environments/vfx/sound/music/code)
• Pose each still image (characters/lighting/cameras/objects) on the timeline
• Press CTRL+F12 to render all images
  • Blender's EEVEE rendering engine creates a 4K image (under ~10mins each)
  • Blender's Compositor takes the render and automatically runs the compositing workflow for Echoes of The Cataclysm, such as Brightness, Contrast, Vignette, Bloom, etc. (under ~1min each)
  • Blender compresses it to the WEBP format and saves the image to the source code

This saves post-processing time and just manual work (hopefully also just provides a better-looking result 💞)

Build Server Stuff

I've also enhanced our build pipeline to automatically:

• Compile for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac, and Web)
• Run validation checks to ensure proper scene transitions
• Strip code comments (they're just my notes anyway 🫣)
• Generate downloadable packages ready for distribution

This behind-the-scenes work will make updates more seamless and reliable.

👀 Sneak Peek

Music used for the first scene:

• Silent Catalyst - Listen on SoundCloud
• Eternal Xana - Listen on SoundCloud

PRISM Facility (extreme rough draft)

Thank you for reading.

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️