Weekly update - Feb 28th

Hi Everyone,

Two months down in 2025 already, this year seems to be disappearing faster than the stock price of my Ethereum! Don't do crypto kids :)

Progress: Not going to lie, it's been slower than I had hoped. Chapter 7 is probably going to be the largest single release I do. Like I said last week it's 25 scenes long. The temptation is to split the chapter release into 2 pieces, as I have done in the past. I have been trying to move away from that though, as I feel doing so lessens the impact of that chapter somewhat. There is also not a logical place to split the story for this chapter either without the release feeling either top or bottom heavy. Therefore I am just going to soldier on with the single release, right now I have a tentative date pencilled in for Mar 20 but even that looks aggressive.

The real numbers behind progress in terms of scene count are: Just completing the final set of the 2nd big scene, once this is complete, which should be today, that will be 10 full scenes done consisting of 226 renders.

The reason for the general slowness is two fold. One the renders for the big scenes have been taking a long time but also I have been going through a polishing up exercise which I've been incredibly thorough (or anal, take your pick :)) in. I've had to re-do a number of renders from old chapters, fix a couple of animations, think I've added one too and generally fix dialogue, spelling and grammar. It's been a lot of work and on occasion, occupying the render rig, which causes the slow down. It'll be worth it in the end though at least to me, perhaps you folks won't notice all the little things I've fixed but it's certainly not been insignificant. I still have more testing to do, I'm just at the end of chapter 3 for Jon/Emma, I'm also redoing testing for the Michael path too.

Anyway, all this leads me to say, I will put out a patch fix for all the versions, probably within the next week, this patch won't contain any new content (what I mean here is any chapter 7 stuff).

Over time I will look to add even more polish, maybe rework some scenes completely, improve renders, to the old chapters. But that's a task for another time, probably post completion.

To keep to my commitment to the Great Friends tier folks, I will release chapter 6 to those of you on that tier on March 10th. Just be aware though that chapter 7 will still follow the timescale of a month from when it drops for "Best Friends".

Steam: Oh my god ! I've had the steam page in to the review team there for a while, they've rejected it three times now, each time with different reasons! All the failures are around early access and it seems like they don't understand the concept of a chapter delivery system, or don't think the potential player base do. Hopefully this last submission is the last one I need to do.

Sorry for the long read, you guys should know by now that I don't use one word when fifteen will do perfectly fine. And also sorry for the somewhat negative message here. However this work I am doing now is work the sorely needs to be done and will build a much better product in the long run. I'm hoping too that chapter 7 work will speed up once this big scene is complete, with a bunch of smaller scenes, less complex ones up next. I see one really big scene left in the chapter, the others should be small to medium size.

Take care folks, thanks for sticking with me.

Cheers,

Fae