Lula's diary (English)

Hello all!

It's been a long time since I thought of making a kind of "press release" about the game, its status, its EVOlution.

There is so much to say that I don't know where to start. (lol)

Don't think it's because I don't post previews all over the social media that I'm not active on Lula.

I have always preferred to work in the shadows. And having to manage social media, to be honest that pisses me off (lol).
Spending time marketing and maintaining an ongoing hype is exhausting, and that's not what keeps the work going, certainly brings more support, but not the work itself.

Having said that, it is obviously a stain that I started to look at in a way that I hope is interesting, intelligent and more original than what we usually see.

Last month the first demo appeared on different sites, I am not responsible for it, even if it gives more views, I have no control over the communication.

I have read the reviews, and have to say that overall they seem positive to me.
Some people seem to be able to form more or less correct ideas about what Lula is, but still far from what I'm doing.
It also serves me for this post which will give some clarification on some questions.

So I am going to warn you already, it is necessary to be able to conceive Lula as a whole and that I can progress for many more months so that you can begin to see, to begin to understand Lula.

Lula is a game that I design around a universe, a story made up of adventures.
The work for Lula is colossal for one person, I do not intend to create a game with a story out of a porn magazine.

So let's start with the story I started writing almost two years ago, with ideas much older than that.

For the story, of course, I have heard inspiration from books and films like 1984, Green Sun, Brave New World, Gattaca, Blade Runner, The Sons of Man and many others in different measures like SF so to use a few shortcuts on certain elements.

You can therefore find similarities with this type of work, but also find similarities with the real world, to write this kind of story we must be based on facts, realities and consider the possibilities.

It is not a simple copy and paste.

Lula's universe is unique, the universe although inspired, is a vision of a possible future, be it companies, actors, products, everything has a background, everything has a story, everything has a source.

Even the machines are based on functions that could work very well in an alternate future when things got out of hand.

Of course to keep the game and the story attractive, I parody things in a hopefully more fun and "crass" way.

I hope you understand that this is a rather complicated exercise for me alone.
Define a world with a policy, laws, an evolution, define characters with their personalities, their interests, their links.
And of course in parallel to materialize this with the work on the game itself, 3d animations, code ... It's a very big exercise.

Also having to explore the darker sides of humanity is a task that is also heavy on my mind.
I think people must sometimes think that I have dark thoughts, that sometimes I get angry or scared about subjects that some will find uninteresting, but I'm like that, if something calls me I will try to understand and consider the worst to find a way out.

But I can tell you that even if Lula's world will be very "dark", of course there will be a way out, Lula can hope for a better world but she will have to "fight" to defend it.

I think that when I have made good progress on the story you will understand my philosophy.

For the writing, while I can take the full story as a rough outline, currently I'm still scripting. Then I will have to do the dialogues in the game.
So on the writing side, there is still a lot of work.


What brings us to the technical points.

Since the writing work, and the way I'm going to integrate and use it, is going to take a lot of time and work.

I primarily develop assets, game elements, progress on animations, code.
I also looked a lot more at certain aspects of gameplay to give more flexibility to the player, to have possibilities of replayability, customizations, activities.

This part will also allow me to be able to develop more fun activities and also to be able to bring content more quickly as well as functions that can leave me time to refine my work on the history and the adventures of the game.

Currently the latest version of the game, cleaned and compressed, is around 10GB.
It's not a breeze, the amount of different assets, each naked actor is hipoly with more than 220K polys, more than 300K polys with their clothes. High resolution textures etc.
Obviously this has a weight.

Despite this amount of polys, I take care with the optimization, ie you don't necessarily need an oversized pc to play in high quality.
An average gaming pc will give very good results, but take into consideration that playing on a laptop with a celeron and integrated graphics may cause problems, let's be okay, it's a real-time 3d game, it's not a renpy game with a slide of images and some videos ...

You will certainly be able to see some assets already used in some way in other games or projects, as I bought several thousand dollars worth of assets from the start.
But all are reworked personally, not to mention the vast majority of assets that I do entirely myself.
So even if you might find some items elsewhere you will definitely notice the difference.

For the animations, the vast majority is done by me too.I did get some mocap animations for basic things but everything else is and will be done by me.
So on this level, 99% is and will be unique.

All the code is also done by me, I don't copy paste from other projects, I don't use plugins for different systems, I prefer to do my code, know what I'm doing and not depend on others dev for updates.
On this level 100% is and will be unique.

Anyway, I think it's already a long post and I hope that tells you a little more about Lula's development.
That you will also notice that designing a game from A to Z takes a lot of work, a lot to tackle.
It is not enough to have only ideas, it is also necessary to be able to assemble them, work them, refine them.
Between having ideas and materializing them, the journey can be long and even take different paths.
I also hope you can imagine the variety of different caps I have to wear to create this game.

I want to thank all the supporters who have supported me a lot from the start and even before.
You have allowed me to get to where I am today. ;)

This post is public and is also for people who are curious about Lula.

Note that supporting Lula gives you access to more recent versions as well as previews on discord.

Lula is not a project that I can develop without any means, I have put my savings and my time into it, and I am coming to a period where the support to be able to continue Lula serenely is a necessity.

If you have an interest and desire to see this project continue to progress and improve over time, I thank you in advance for considering supporting this project.

Rest assured that Lula is a project that is close to my heart.

Thank you for taking the time to read this big post and for the consideration you have for Lula.

See you soon!