🎉 Happy New Year! 2023 🎉

It's been a tough year for all of us... Let everyone bring their own meaning to this sentence, because it was hard for everyone in their own way. And I hope 2023 will be kinder to us.

In this post, I would like to talk about how I became the developer of Our Bright Days. And I'll start with...

January 23, 2020. I'm a learner.

Damn! How long ago it was! At that time, I was a simple 3D modeler with an experience of 4 and a half months. I was watching lots of tutorials, took some small free courses. Nothing augured until I started playing games like Dating My Daughter and Melody by MrDots and Witch Trainer by Akabur. Not that I really liked them... I'm a very picky player. But they influenced me a little. I tried other games too, but I didn't like any of them. Didn't like anything at all.

And in the end, I started modeling an apartment.

I made the first sketches and went to download and conquer Daz...

Don't be scared! She doesn't bite! She'll only suck the life out of you >:D

These are the first renders I done in Daz. Yes, they're terrible and I had no idea what I was doing. But I even managed to make some kind of a game and posted it on itch.io on February 23 under the name Dizzy City Life. I didn’t expect anything at all from it, I just tried to repeat after other devs. I created Patreon, and on the same day I forgot about it, continuing to study Daz...

March 27, 2020. The very first subscriber on my Patreon.

One F95 moderator posted Dizzy City Life on the forum, and... people started talking about it. A month later, I had 23 subscribers and almost $80 per month. I wasn't ready for this! I just woke up one day with 20+ notifications on my phone. The sensations were simply unforgettable. But there were a few things I didn't like about the game...

Quality. It's just awful, and I knew it then. It was my maximum. I felt responsible for the quality because I started creating this one only because I didn’t like other games. And I got carried away...

Someone on the forum mentioned adding a phone and I thought why not? I made a phone in haste, rendered a map that almost burned my GPU (it weighed a lot :). And then I realized that I was stuck. I didn't know how to code Ren'Py for production. Everything was made of shit and sticks, and working with shit did not give me any pleasure.

The only thing I cut out of the game is what is in the picture on the right. "Santa's Corner" seemed too complicated for me to maintain, and I replaced it with a fruit gallery. The phone, on the other hand, was transformed as much as possible, a social network appeared in it, a gallery, notes, but inside its code it was as scary as a nuclear war. If I released this game, it would break on the second launch.

September 2021. Is the final coming up?

The content was made up to Mariya's birthday. I was getting closer to release and was practicing doing renders every day to keep the game going after the game was released. But at this point, I didn’t like the way the MC looked, and I decided to redo the renders with him. It's good that I always keep all backups. It was necessary to remake quite a bit... 

And here I am fucking redoing absolutely everything. All 700 renders. I literally demolished everything and started re-rendering. No, it's not the same as making new content now. It was a living hell. And in order not to go crazy, I had to not think about how much I had left to redo.

1. Did it make me sick? Yes!!
2. How did I justify myself? The fact that the first impression of the game is very important.
3. Was it all necessary? Absolutely yes mafaka!

It was at that moment that all my best ideas were born. To make my work easier, I needed to start writing my toolkit for Daz and Blender, which ultimately gave me the opportunity to link these two programs. I talked about this in more detail here.

In parallel, I delved into textures and lighting so that I could optimize my models (I only fully finished this recently). Each time I learned something new about anatomy, noticed and corrected flaws on models that I hadn't seen before. And over time, my characters began to diverge from what the standard Daz models looked like.

7 months before release...

PayPal stopped working in our country... After this news, I felt depressed. And I just continued to work out of inertia I didn't know what to do else. Sometimes I felt like I was doing it all for nothing

At the same moment, I just needed to show my parents that I could earn money, otherwise I would have had to look for a job. I had an agreement with them, according to which I had to compensate for my expulsion from the university with at least some profitable work.

In the same period, I began to have health problems that detracted me from working.

There was only one solution - to release the game.

And yet I knew how to hope for the best and cope with stress. Otherwise, how did I not burn out in all this time?

7 days before release...

About 300 code files, a large number of prepared features, some of which are still waiting for their moment. I tested the game on everything that was powered by electricity. Everything worked great.

September 6, 2022. Fin.

Like last time, I uploaded the game on itch.io. An hour later it was already on the F95. After some time, the first reviews appeared. They were wonderful. But the game turned out to have terrible control. It turned out that what was convenient for me was not convenient for the players. I quickly began to correct and rework everything that they wrote to me, and at the same time I found a very good English proofreader who works conscientiously.

He did a beautiful job, and soon version 0.1.1 was released!

• • •

I still have a lot to do, I have big plans for this project. For almost 3 years I've dedicated myself not only to the development of the game, but to teaching myself the profession of a game developer.

Thanks to those who have read to the end! And Happy New Year, friends!

P.S. Soon I'll upload some pics!