It’s time for another GOLDEN HOUR development update, and this time we’ve reached a pretty important milestone.
We can finally say that the work on all static images is complete. Every single one has been prepared. What’s important is that this was actually the second full pass over the visuals. This time, our goal wasn’t simply to make every image look better. We put much more emphasis on preserving the original facial features, identity, and character of each person as closely as possible.Every image goes through a very complex machine-assisted processing pipeline, but one of our highest priorities throughout this second pass was consistency. In some cases, we deliberately sacrificed a bit of the final visual impact, additional detail, or more dramatic lighting if we felt that those improvements were changing the original character too much.And we didn’t simply process thousands of images and call it a day. Every single image was manually reviewed by us. Whenever we noticed something that didn’t look right, didn’t feel consistent enough, or moved too far away from the original, we corrected it. It was an enormous amount of additional work, but we believe it was absolutely necessary to achieve the level of quality we want for GOLDEN HOUR.
There’s another important part of this process. After listening carefully to your feedback, we decided to detune some of the images where the skin had gained too much artificial detail. In certain cases, those details could make a character look older or simply different from the person you remembered from the original game. That wasn’t what we wanted.Because of this, we recreated all dialogue images and their corresponding animations from scratch once again.
Our rule became very simple: Preserving the uniqueness of the face and the original character of the image comes first. Everything else comes second. Additional details, lighting, skin texture and other visual enhancements should improve what was already there, not redefine it.
This philosophy became increasingly important to us as our work on GOLDEN HOUR progressed.
We’re still working on the animations. There are around 40 of them that are proving to be a particularly tough nut to crack, as they don’t cooperate very well with our new rendering pipeline. We’re currently looking for the best workaround to handle these problematic cases and get them completed as soon as possible.The next major step is the final verification of all animations in the game.We’ll go through them again and judge them using the same standards we now apply to the static images. If an animation doesn’t meet those standards, we won’t hesitate to redo it. Simple as that.We’ve already invested an enormous amount of work into this project, so there’s no point in accepting something that we know could be better.
We’ve learned a hell of a lot while working on GOLDEN HOUR. From a technical perspective, we’re already light-years ahead of where we were when we started this project. We’ve significantly expanded our workflow, improved our techniques, learned much more about the tools we’re using, and developed skills that will be absolutely invaluable for our future projects.And you can see those improvements directly in GOLDEN HOUR. There are moments where familiar scenes, presented again through completely new visuals, can genuinely take your breath away. Seeing something you already know transformed and visually retold in this way can make a surprisingly huge difference. Some of these scenes look absolutely fucking incredible.
But perhaps the most important lesson came from you. Your feedback, including the criticism, became one of the driving forces behind many of the improvements we made. It pushed us to explore aspects of our tools that we probably wouldn’t have explored otherwise. It made us refine our techniques, rethink certain decisions, and shift our priorities from simply pursuing the biggest possible visual improvement toward finding the right balance between quality, consistency, and respect for the original artwork.
So I genuinely want to thank you for that criticism. It helped us make GOLDEN HOUR better. And I believe the changes we’ve made as a result will help us create something that can win over even some of the players who were initially skeptical about the visual direction we wanted to take.
We’re not trying to replace the identity of AMERICAN SUNSET - we’re trying to preserve it, while showing you just how much more we can do with it today. And we’re getting very, very close.