Episode 2
A Night in Hallon
Nyx and her team head out from the capital on their journey to Thalmia, and her new squad mates quickly start butting heads. After a close call in the forest, they stop for the night at the small village of Hallon, where their hosts make them feel extra welcome...
At long last, Episode 2 is out!
We pushed the initial update minutes before midnight hit on the 30th, and a few hotfixes since then, but the game is now officialy out and working for (hopefully) all players!
Some quick notes:
- If you previously opted into the beta, you'll need to opt out of it and back to the main branch before the update will become available (we know, we're working on fixing that).
- If the game gives you an error about being unable to find the correct file path, or doesn't seem to update, go into the Properties, then into Installed Files, then click on "Verify integrity of game files".
If for some reason it still doesn't work, please contact us via Discord and we'll do our best to get things sorted!
The journey here was a long one.
A very.... very long one. Obviously it's not how we planned on things going. There are a lot of reasons for it:
- Time mismanagement
- Underestimating how long certain tasks take (posing and rigging of additional Live2D sprites)
- Tools that worked for scenes in episode 1 that started to seriously lag with the additional complexity of scenes in episode 2
- Scope creep, dissatisfaction with the visuals
A lot of reasons. But no excuses.
Now, we have a much better idea of what to expect going into Episode 3.
Such as the fact that a single 9 character scene takes as much time as eight 2 character scenes... (The final scene looks great, but absolutely not worth the stress and delay it caused.) It didn't help that we added a lot more "sprite animation" into the game, which just exacerbated the issue.
Speaking of... the more complex scenes in Episode 2 caused a LOT of issues with how we were laying out and designing the scenes. The scenes are all layed out and roughly animated in After Effects, before being transferred to code, which worked great in Episode 1... but once the scenes got more complex, the lag it started generating started to become a real problem (losing 60+ seconds every time you save doesn't sound like much, but it can drive a man insane...)
In fact, it got so bad that we wound up building some tools these past couple of months to help speed up the scene posing, and have some rough concepts of additional workflow tools to speed things up. We haven't FULLY gotten away from After Effects yet, but with a bit more development on these tools, we'll get 99% of the way there. We'll post more about these tools and behind the scenes stuff soon.
If we'd decided to go with the standard "one character on the left, one on the right" format of visual novels, we wouldn't have any of these problems... but we didn't. That's not what we wanted for Vaygren. From the beginning, we always wanted Vaygren LT to feel as much like watching an anime as possible, and to pull that off that means A LOT of custom code, custom tools, and figuring out how to work with the limited assets we have to pull off the look we want.
We're not a big studio. It's just been the two of us doing the bulk of the work, and our skillsets don't crossover much. We're fixing some of that going forward (hiring additional help, etc), but this game remains a passion project for the two of us at the core of Cyberframe. This is the game we want to make, and we're gonna make it.
And to that end, while we aren't happy about how long it took... we are happy with what we've made.
We'll be taking the next week or so to get things in order for Episode 3, figuring out how to improve some of our workflow and tools (expect a post elaborating on all of that!), and in general getting things ready so that the wait for Episode 3 will be a much, much shorter affair.
Our development livestreams will be resuming in the next week or so, and we are excited to move on from Episode 2 and finally put our full focus on Episode 3!
Now that that's out of the way...
What are you still doing here? Get that game updated and enjoy!