Heya! In this special development log, I would like to introduce you to someone special that you’ll be living together with in the future. Meet Xandra Mae. Xandra Mae is from a Southeast Asian country, where she’ll be living with her brother. She lives in an impoverished area, and her family struggles to make ends meet, often lacking even the bare necessities. After scraping together enough money to pay for her tuition and the dental braces she needed, they decided that living with her brother was the best choice, financially. It’s also helpful that her brother lives much closer to her school.

Xandra likes her school and loves spending time with her brother. She’s the smartest in the family, and everyone has high hopes for her to graduate and climb out of poverty. She is kind, thoughtful, a bit shy and goes to church. Xandra is self-conscious that her skin tans so easily.

Start of Living Together 2, Parallel Development

I’ll start posting regular Special DevLogs for my Super Fans and Super Enjoyers with updates, renders, compositions and mechanics for/in Living Together 2. Some of you may wonder: why start on game 2 already? Developing a game takes a long time. Before I made the first public release of Living Together, I worked on it intermittently for more than a year. If I were to start development of the second game only after I finished the first game, there would be a gap of a year or at least 6 months where I would have nothing playable for you.

I feel I can keep up the same production speed for the current game while starting development on the second game in parallel. This will drastically reduce the time between finishing game 1 and having something playable for game 2. This is just much more enjoyable for you and, granted, also for me and the financial viability of it all. It’s the best alternative for everyone, I think ^_^.

New Rendering & Compression Techniques

Many lessons were learned from the start of Living Together. I’ve learned how to do lighting and camera, but also the rendering itself has undergone significant improvements. I want to start Living Together 2 from this improved point. The pictures below are rendered with 8k Oversampling. This technique involves rendering the CG in 8k and then downsampling it to 4K, which immensely improves its anti-aliasing without resorting to methods like supersampling or blurring, thereby maintaining fidelity. 

Coupled with next-generation models and 4k textures and 16k HDRI lighting for everything, the results speak for themselves. She appears to be standing behind a clear window, ready to step right out into your room. Another advantage of this method is that I can use a modern compression technique that preserves 99% of the graphical fidelity while cutting multiple megabytes per frame. This can quickly translate to gigabytes of storage space saved for the same length of gameplay. Even with the compression in effect, the result is still many times better than what was possible in Living Together 1.

To give you an idea, the example renders below are approximately 25% of the file size of a similar render from Living Together 1. Meanwhile, the model looks much more realistic and detailed.

I’ll update my Super Fans and Super Enjoyers more frequently about the sequel’s progress, including more graphical details, building the house, and what Xandra looks like in her wardrobe (and, of course, without her wardrobe ;D ). 

Let me know what you think!

Cheers!