Hello everyone,
Last week was pretty good. I had a few hiccups here and there, but nothing too serious. I focused almost entirely on 3D work, spent some time learning another software that could help me with a few things, and took care of some other miscellaneous tasks.
I also want to address what I said in last week's devlog. I'm sorry if I rubbed any of you the wrong way when I used the word "evil." I'm usually pretty chill, and about 69% of the time I'm joking around and not taking myself too seriously. I didn't mean anything by it, so really, all the conclusions I've seen people jump to... just relax. Speculating before Episode 5 is out won't do much good, and most of the time it's pretty far from what I've actually got planned for the game. I'll be a bit more careful with how I phrase my humor from now on.
Anyway, back to the devlog.
Like I said, last week was pretty good. I got a lot of work done on the party scenes. It's split into two "Freeroam" events, kind of like the expo gallery in Episode 3, along with two regular VN routes and then the conclusion.
Right now, it looks something like this:
Pre-party eventFreeroam 1Regular VN route 1Freeroam 2Regular VN route 2Conclusion
At the moment, I'm working on the second scene of Freeroam 1. I'm nearly done with it and should be moving on to the next one today. What I like about this Freeroam structure is that it lets me add minigames, dialogue variations, and other little things that can unlock extra scenes, lewds, and so on. My goal is to make it feel natural instead of grindy, something that flows with the rhythm of the game, and I think I'm doing a pretty good job with that. I'll probably be spending the next 6 to 8 weeks on this event, so I made sure to plan it out properly.
Let's talk numbers:
Static renders: 1,990Animations: 71Story content: 30 scenes written (27,789 words)
That's 194 extra renders since last week. I should've easily hit 200, but on Saturday I got a new computer case and AIO since one of the rigs was getting old. It was the first one I built five years ago, and it had started making a lot of noise, so I decided to move everything over.
Of course, I ended up missing a PCIe cable and couldn't rebuild it properly, so I lost a lot of time on Saturday because of that. Otherwise, we probably would've hit both the 200 weekly renders milestone and the 2,000 renders milestone for this update.
I only started this dev cycle a little under three months ago, and I took about two weeks off at one point, so I'd say things are looking pretty solid so far. On top of that, with the addition of those 5090s, I think we're in a good spot for the release window I'm aiming for, as long as I can keep the momentum going. So let's keep at it.
Anyway, that's it for this week's update. I'm going to get back to work, and in the meantime, I hope you all have a great week.
MisterMaya