Haven's Port - Test Renders and a Few Details

Alright first, a quick notice: I finished up the writing for last month's story reward. It still needs an editing pass, but it will be published tonight. Sorry again for the delay -_-.

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Now, onto the meat of this post! Haven's Port stuff! First, let me stress that the attached images are TEST RENDERS only. The character represented in them isn't fully finished yet (in fact, right now she's a mostly out-of-the-box Gia 8 render). I'm currently mostly focused on ironing out technical issues, which can be seen in the attached images. If you look at the black and blonde-haired versions, you'd note some serious graininess to the characters. This was one of the problems I was having at the end of last month, that prevented me from posting a test render. As you can see in the red-haired version, though, I've managed to largely eliminate the issue (after two days of poking and prodding at render settings -_-). I'm still not entirely happy, both because there is a little remaining 'noise' on the character skin (mostly in shadow areas)....and because the renders are currently taking 2 hours per, and they really shouldn't be. I've made major upgrades to my system since rendering the test images for the Drow Trainer game, and neither of those (which were rendered at full 2k as opposed to the 1080p these were) took longer than 45 minutes or so. With the same render engine. GRRRRRRRRRR... 

Technical issues aside, I wanted to give a bit of a rundown on what to expect for this first month. There will be other posts, hopefully with actual game renders, sharing various details on planned content for the game and such. For now, I just wanted to make sure everyone has a realistic idea of what they'll see this month, as far as Haven's Port goes :-).

Put simply, new games always take a bit of front-end work. Thankfully, this isn't like Chastity Quest, where I was dealing with multiple new software packages AND making the first build oversized. So no need to worry about not seeing content for months, or anything like that. However, don't expect a fullscale first build this month. At the very least, you will get the intro to the game, hopefully with at least a couple of early scenes as well. However, between the need to iron out any technical hiccups, plus the need to plan out and implement core game systems... Well, just don't expect the impossible, yes? I'm still spending fully half of the month on Chastity Quest, after all :-p.

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For those curious, all of the assets featured in the images are ones that I'm intending to use in the game. The Gia 8 figure is the based model for the main character, seeing as 'female main character' kinda overwhelmingly won the poll. This isn't the end-result character, though, as the only thing I've tweaked from the base model is her breast size. I try never to use a purely base-model character, so that my characters don't look like anyone else's, in so much as that's possible. Example in point, I haven't actually decided which hair color looks best for what I'm going for...

Likewise, the outfit featured in the redhead version is intended to be used for the intro to the game, as the 'prisoner/slave' rags before your rescue. Though, likely without the boots and gloves. The white dress, on the other hand, is the base asset I'm thinking to use for what your rescuers give you to start out with (Yes, I'm planning for the player to be able to change the character's outfits! Hopefully. I think I've got that figured out!). Though I'm thinking I may change the color via a bit of fiddling with the materials. If I can. That's often a bit of an iffy proposition.

The bar, on the other hand, will likely go into the game as is :-). I'm quite happy with that particular asset! Though I think it may be partly responsible for the long render times -_-. I've got some ideas there, to cut down on that, if that's the case. I'll get it worked out!