Weekly Update - Feb 7th

Hi Everyone,

As you saw in my previous post, I finally finished the biggest and most important scene of Chapter 6. I'm now firmly into the final stretch. It's a long stretch still but I'm getting there. There are 6 more scenes to go, if we work on a principle of 2 days per scene that would bring me out to a delivery date for Chapter 6 of Feb 19th. However not all scenes are created equal, at least half of the ones left are pretty simple. I'm therefore confident to predict an ETA for Chapter 6 of Feb 15th.

One word of caution though, Tues and Wed of this week was a bit of a nightmare in terms of rendering. My rendering rig suffered from intermittent blue screens of death, slowing down the progress of course. I've re-installed everything, flushed out a few things and yesterday the system was stable again, so hopefully it was just a little hiccup and nothing major. I think the issue is with the windows install on the PC, it may also be a fault with the NVME, that's a simple and cheap fix, if I just have to switch that out, I will order another one soon, I could use extra disk space anyway.

So back to the fun stuff. I am really happy with how that scene came together, it was a pretty ambitious one for me, that may not show to the player though but there was a lot involved and I am glad I took the time to get it right. I've completed 2 scenes since that one and both have been completed faster than I thought, hence my confidence above. There is one scene to come I am a little worried about because there will be a lot of characters in it and those are the ones where rendering times get lengthy. The rest are fine.

I talked last week about thinking about making Chapter 4 free. I am going to do that soon, this is my plan for the next few weeks:

Feb 10th - Make Chapter 5 (complete) available to Great Friend tier.

Feb 15th - Release Chapter 6 to Best Friend Tier

Feb 16th - Put Chapter 5 (complete) on Itch as a paid chapter (contingent on being able to upload the file)

Feb 16th - Make Chapter 4 Free.

Feb 17th - 18th - Build Steam trailer.

Feb 19th - Start Chapter 7.

Around Feb 20th - Set up the Steam page (probably not release to Steam though until Chapter 7 is complete).

These dates could all move depending on the progress I make, I tend in general to be pessimistic in my estimates. Something I learned as a Project Manager years ago is that it's far easier to hand money back than ask for more :)

So that's it, one quick thing before I sign off. I like to put a little teaser picture of the upcoming chapter for these updates, however it is hard for this particular one because it's difficult to find a render that doesn't give too much of the story away, so you may see very similar pictures here or cropped renders, sorry about that but I need to keep my secrets :)

As always thank you so much for your continued support, take care.

Fae