Erisa's Summer: Happy 2021! - Xmas Renders & Update

Hi and Happy New Year everyone!

This is my first, long overdue, update to the blog - and possibly one of the few long-form posts you'll see from me here. For the most part, I've moved to making longer updates on the game's f95zone page and shorter updates on my Twitter (@ErisaSummer). I also actively monitor the game's itch.io presence and reply to any comments there.

First off: good riddance to 2020. Though I was able to complete day 2 and do the remastering work to integrate the old RPGM day 1 content (at higher quality) into the modern Ren'Py client, I was medically debilitated most of the year and any time I pushed myself to work on the game, I made things worse for myself. Naturally, everything was compounded by coronavirus, including my day job. I still feel very fortunate to have secure employment, but things have just gotten busier and busier there as well, which has cut down on development time.

In short: I was able to put out a few releases (hooray!), but global and personal problems prevented me from doing more (boo!). I don't expect things to get better from the job perspective, but I'm optimistic that COVID will get better at the end of the year now that vaccines are being distributed and I'm in the late stages of recovering from the medical procedure I underwent to correct my own non-COVID troubles. So, things are getting better for me.

I also went ahead and upgraded my rendering situation by purchasing an RTX 3090, which is capable of doing amazing things like fully converging the image below in 15 minutes. Previously, it had to render on CPU for over 8 hours.

This is helping me get higher quality images and (especially) more complex images done at a more rapid pace, so I'm hoping this will help me be more productive and weigh against some of my other limitations. It should also help improve animation quality.

As for where things stand right now, I've changed my process for day 3 and am writing and rendering concurrently, where I used to make a bunch of images and then write around them. I think this new way is working out better and makes more sense now that things are more set in motion and there's more to keep track of from a writing/coding perspective.

I have all of the images and text completed through three morning mini-events and four primary breakfast paths, each of which has about three sub-paths. Last night I also completed transitionary scenes into what I call the "midday" portion of the day - this is where you would have your pool/casino/gym/bar/peeping options in day 2. It'll be a bit of a different setup in day 3, but I think you'll still enjoy the different experiences of getting to know different girls.

I'm still not sure how far into 2021 it'll be before I make a new release, but I intend for v0.5.0 to comprise day 3 and all possible routes from morning to evening. Depending on how things go, it may be still be a while, but I'll keep doing my best to push forward as quickly as I can and will keep my channels updated.

Thanks for staying interested in this long-developing piece of work - I hope to make it worthwhile and I'm hopeful 2021 will deliver on that.

Here as an added bonus are a few fun Christmas-themed renders I did for the holidays: