SPICY INTERVIEW - DRIFTY

If you’ve spent any time at all on the adult game discords and forums, you might’ve heard of a game called Leap of Faith, it’s an extremely interesting game that combines likable characters with some solid visual storytelling that gives you a well-paced adventure. We were looking forward to talking to Drifty about his game and discussing how he managed to create something so well-loved.

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1Q: I was really impressed by how unique this game’s “voice” is. So which games or other media inspired you to create Leap of Faith?

Drifty: Several types of media give me inspiration, it being movies, books, or games. But probably books more than anything. I find creative imagery in writing far more interesting than an actual image, although there are advantages in both.

2Q: Can you share any early concepts of the game?

Drifty: I downloaded Daz studio one day and started working right off the bat. My very first 1920x1080 render is actually in the game today, where the MC wakes up in chapter 1. So I only did a very few renders before it to test, and they are horrible. But here they are. An early version of Kira, and Cece (all that clipping hurts me just looking at it). Not very visually pleasing, but hey, we all got to start somewhere.

EARLY CONCEPT 1

3Q: What’s your favorite part of developing this game? What’s your least favorite part of it?

Drifty: My favorite part is making the scenes come together. I try to use different ways to display what I want to portray by image sequences or multi-layered images, so when I put it all together with the music and see the finished scene it brings a huge smile to my face.

The worst part is when I start working on such a scene and I'm a bit hyped about it, knowing how it will look. But I know it'll be a week until I can see the final version because it takes a lot of work and time to render getting there.

4Q: The first thing that made me realize that this is a great game is when I saw Steph’s shoe in the foreground as the first episode ended. Generally, this game has really good visual storytelling. Have you had any prior experience in visual media?

Drifty: I have a Bachelor's degree in Photography, but ironically I've never worked as one. Instead, I spent many years as a sound engineer and music producer where I have absolutely no education. But having some background in both of these areas has really been helpful when making a visual novel, even if my photography education is from a time when film negatives, dark rooms, and chemicals that gave you a two-day headache were a thing.

But on the positive side, I had a lot of experience setting up scenes for photoshoots, and that was a huge help when I did my first experiments with lighting in Daz studio

EARLY CONCEPT 2

5Q: . George RR Martin describes two types of writers, one is a gardener, the kind of writer who likes to see their story grow organically and the other is architect, the kind who likes to plan most of the story beats in advance, would you consider yourself a gardener or an architect? Have you mapped out the whole story or do you like to figure things out as the story and characters develop?

Drifty: I'm not going to argue with RR Martin if he narrows it down to those two alone, but I'm a bit of both. I have the main story mapped out together with different arches, so I know what will happen. But I leave a whole lot of room for improvisation. An example of this is in chapter 1 when my script says: "Goes bowling with Kira" - and that's it. Everything that happened in that bowling scene is improvised.

6Q:  I can see how even though ep 1 started strongly, the later episodes have further improved renders, which aspect of game development do you think you’ve improved on the most since starting?

Drifty: Honestly, I hope I'm improving in all areas. At least that's the goal. I experiment a lot, and even if things don't yield the result I'm hoping for, there's always something to learn. It's hard not to pick up something here and there when you spend the amount of time I do working with Daz Studio.

Other than that, I try picking up some udemy classes and guides, although nothing beats trial and error.

EARLY CONCEPT 3

7Q:  I really like how charming, helpful, and an all-around well-meaning fella The MC of Leap of Faith is. Are you like him in real life?

Drifty: Ok, so you gave me a bit of a laugh with that question. But when I think about it, even if I wasn't actively trying to duplicate myself as the MC, it's inevitable that he's got some of my traits. My main goal though was to give him as much personality as possible and portray him as a person everyone can identify with to some degree.

8Q:  I know story writing, especially that has sex as one of the primary focuses can result in falling into having too many clichéd scenes or recurrent plot devices, so how do you personally avoid that?

Drifty: My idea with Leap of Faith is that it's a story first and foremost, and the sex scenes serve as the icing on the cake. I've avoided inserting sex scenes for every possible scene where they theoretically could have had sex, and tried to build them naturally for special moments, like falling in love, reconciling, or having spent time apart. That way I felt I could give them a more significant scene.

I also use other visuals to display that they are sexually active. For example, when Kira walks in on Linda and the MC at the absolute worst possible time when Linda is giving head, only to realize what they did because of some leftovers on Linda's face. It's just a small scene where you see nothing more than Linda's head going up and down.

9Q: One thing you’re really good at is creating unique and well-written NPCs, so yeah, where do you get the inspiration for? And Who's your favorite (in-game) waifu?

Drifty: Every person is in some way inspired by real-life people. But there's no real-life equivalent of Kira, Lexi, Linda, Cece, and so forth. For instance, Steph is a mixture of about 7 people. I notice a lot of personality quirks in people, and it's easy to bring them together to produce a completely different person for my own story.

And all time favorite waifu from any game? There are so many good ones out there, but Yennefer from the witcher is an all-time high ranker.

10Q: My man! I love her as well. So your update cycle is relatively tight compared to your peers, how do you manage to dish out updates regularly without burning out?

Drifty: Honestly, I try to work on this game when I can. It also helps to enjoy what you do, and I certainly do. I remember doing my very first render on the 14th of January 2020, and when I released chapter 4 on December 22nd, I sat down thinking back on the whole year realizing I'd just taken two days off.

It's not that I have an active goal of working every single day, and I've become a bit better at taking time off every once in a while now compared to earlier - but on the other side, any day I don't work, is a day delay.

11Q: How much do you pay attention to the feedback from the fans and How do you go about balancing on changes according to feedback and sticking to your original plans? Do player expectations play a huge role in your planning for the next updates?

Drifty: I'm in no way living the illusion that I've created a perfect story where nothing can be improved, but as a developer, you have to be stubborn with your idea and dare go in directions you feel is right because you know more than the player does.

This was much harder in the beginning when I was completely new to this, and my goal was to please as many as possible without changing the main feel of the story. As time passes you realize the players gain faith in what you do, and accept there's a good reason for something they don't completely agree with.

Having said that, I also enjoy reading reviews. Good and bad ones. It gives me a certain idea of how I'm doing, even if the reviewer completely disagrees with me.

12Q: IF you were to go back in time, what one thing would you change about the game?

Drifty: That's easy. Remove the option to refuse to have sex with Stephanie in chapter 1. This choice was added about a week after the initial release of the game because the players wanted to turn her down.

The reason I regret adding it is because the MC - jumping out Stephs window in a hurry - would be having one of the worst days of his life, something Cece would pick up on the bridge, and it would have made more sense with the later chapter 7 reveal.

If you reject Stephanie in chapter 1 and walk out the door, the later events are less obvious.

13Q: What Apps or software do you use for creating your games and do you have preferences over one another, if so, why? Do you recommend any underrated software applications to fellow devs?

Drifty: I'm afraid I'm quite boring when it comes to software. I use Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, Ableton Live, Substance, and XNconvert, simply because that's what I'm used to. In addition to that, I dabble a bit in Cinema 4d with the Octane rendering engine. Unfortunately, none of them are free or even cheap.

14Q: Do you create your own character models?

Drifty: I dove right into Daz and started rendering story renders from day 3, so I had no idea what was possible. Therefore most of the characters are stock models with very few tweaks.

Later on, when I introduced Linda to chapter 2 and Holly to chapter 4 I changed them with morphs, and especially Linda is completely unrecognizable from the stock model.

I should also add that I did just about every mistake in the book when selecting the hair for them, as some of them are horrible to work with. There's a reason Lexi is complaining about the hair. She just echoes my frustrated sighs and eye-rolls.

15Q: I checked your latest status update and sheesh, you already have prepared 240 or so renders. Do you work solo? If so how do you manage to balance everything and still get so much work done so quickly?

Drifty: LoF is indeed a solo project. And that number isn't really all that high. It would have been closer to double if it hadn't been for the fact that this is the latest chapter and because of it, there are more animations than normal which is occupying the computer for most of the time.

I don't really see myself as fast, but in the end, it comes down to how effective you are for those hours you're working on it, and sacrifice just a tiny bit of perfectionism.

16Q:  Do you have issues with your render times? How did you overcome them? Any suggestions or tips on improving(essentially reducing) the render time for us with potato PCs?

Drifty: LoF has a very simplistic look. It renders in HD with noise reduction. It was something I had to do because I was rendering with sub-par hardware (a 2060 GPU), and it was something I did all the way until halfway through chapter 6. So until then I was rendering with fewer iterations than I think is normal, and for animations, I went below half of that. I knew I had to do it this way because I had planned to use a lot of visuals, which meant a whole lot of rendering. But even when I finally got a hand on my first 3090, I kept the visual style, as I felt that downsized 4k renders without noise reduction were a completely different visual look.

For tips, I'd like to go against what most people say. So basically, set up your scene, turn on noise reduction early (let's say 100th iteration) as it gives you more speed. Run a sample render. Pause it at 1000 iterations, save it, continue doing the same every 1000 iterations. Compare in the end and ask yourself if adding two hours each render is worth it for ten times the iterations.

And yes, I know that just about every Daz artist out there is shaking their head now, saying things like: "You should never turn on noise reduction, and if you do, you should turn it on at the very last iteration." I think some high-profile dev said this at some point, and it became a trend to repeat it. But feel free to render, check and compare for yourself. You might be surprised.

I've heard devs with the very best equipment available saying their renders take two hours to complete. Well, you don't get those two hours back. Multiply it by thousands of renders, and it adds up.

17Q: That’s a very useful advice. So how has your experience been in the adult gaming industry so far? What are the biggest advantages and disadvantages you’ve come across so far?

Drifty: The positives outweigh the negatives by far. The best thing has been getting to know other devs, and also the people who I interact with on my Discord server from time to time. Being a solo dev means you work in solitude, and even if my girlfriend knows what I'm doing and is being above generally interested - having others to discuss, share opinions, trade tricks, and whatnot, is by far the best perk connected to doing this.

The major disadvantage of spending a whole lot of time in Daz Studio is that I instantly see clipping and visual errors in other games. Funnily enough, I still miss them in my own game from time to time.

18Q: Do you play AVNs often? If so, which ones are your favorites currently?

There's very little time to spare in my already stretched schedule for playing. But there are some I try to play because I played them long before I started my own project, due to already being invested in their story. Especially Rebirth and Love of Magic keeps me coming back every once in a while.

And a few I picked up along the way, like Chasing Sunsets, Artemis, Summer Scent and Unbroken.

But please don't ask me about what happened in the latest updates in these. Because there's a huge chance I haven't played the latest update (or two, or three - you get the idea).

Also, apologies to anyone I forgot. I wish I was a more avid AVN reader. My list of games I want to play doesn't seem to be getting any smaller.

19Q: What is/are your advice(s) for the new developers that are just starting out with their games?

Drifty: Ask yourself if you enjoy what you're doing. That's basically all there's to it. The rest you can learn.

20Q: What lies in the future for the game? How far into the final product do you reckon you are?

Drifty: Chapter 8, which I'm making now, is the final chapter of the story. Many have asked for more chapters, but I feel it's wrong trying to extend on the original story to keep it going. Now it has a very defined timeline, and changing it would just be me trying to squeeze as much out of it as possible. I have mentioned I'd like to get the gang back together for another chapter at some point, and I have a story idea for it, but no promises on if and when. At some point, I reckon I'll ask my Patreons about it and see how the mood for it is.

21Q:  Do you tend to play LoF often? Not for proofreading, just for having fun, that is. What kind of build do you gravitate towards? Athletic, Romantic or flirty?

Drifty: I rarely play LoF. Once I'm done with a chapter, that's in the past and I'm looking forward to the next. But before releases, I play through the full story once with the new chapter added. It's one way I'm making sure that it flows nicely through the different chapters. There are scenes early on I kinda want to redo, but I probably won't. Starting to redo something can turn into a major overhaul before you know it.

As for the traits, I'm an all-round kind of guy. I always end up getting points here and there, then losing out on some of the extras later on because I didn't focus on one or two traits.

22Q: Are there any particular fetishes that you're excited to introduce in the game? Do you focus a lot on trying to introduce any particular fetishes in the game?

Drifty: I feel the sex scenes supplement the romantic character of the story, and I feel it doesn't allow for too much sexual experimentation. The characters in the game evolve naturally sexually, but the main focus is where they end up when the curtain is going down in the last scene of the game.

23Q: Hypothetically, if you were to choose someone to voice-act the characters, who'd you pick?

Drifty: Seeing as I'm starting my next project soon, there's only one option to build any hype - hiring Keanu Reeves as the MC. I mean, why aim lower than breathtaking. But on a serious note, I love the voice acting of "Vicky" in the game House Party. No idea who it is though.

24Q: What's next for you as a dev after LoF?

Drifty: A new game! Well, it's way too early to start dishing out any details, but I've been working on the script for more than a year. It's not LoF 2, and in many ways that terrifies me how it will be received, but at the same time I believe it's a better story with a big variety of girls and paths, stitched together nicely with a completely different atmosphere.

It's going to be a sad moment when I render the last scene for LoF and say goodbye to them all. But I'm really looking forward to starting afresh too. This time with more than 2 days of Daz testing.

25Q: Where are you from? What did you do before developing adult games?

Drifty: I'm a father, boyfriend, family member, friend, and terribly bad dad joke inventor from (the sometimes very cold) Norway. Education in Photography and as a Network Administrator. I've worked for companies, run companies. Spent many years in sound production, making anything from pop music to environmental sound design in games. I no longer work with music, but I still have a day job in addition to Daz genital work and enjoy it very much. The first computer I ever turned on was a C64, but I'm not old enough to be a boomer. Oh, and I've crossed skydiving off my bucket list. It's highly recommended.

26Q: What led you onto the path of creating adult games?

Drifty: I never aimed directly at making an adult game. Many books contain sexual encounters or written erotic imagery without being labeled as adult stories. So when I released Chapter 1, I published it on Itch in the "erotic" category. Some pirate site picked it up, tagged it "adult", "big ass", "big boobs", and all hell broke loose.

But in all seriousness, somebody told me I should write a story. Some day I just decided to do i

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