It's the "Almost there" update...

Hello!

I hope you had a good Christmas and had a nice holiday. And now to business!

The important bit

First things first, Patreon will once again be turned off for January but *cue drum roll* it will be activated from February. Anyone who follows me on twitter or pops into Discord now and again will know I've been wrestling with this one the past few weeks. I'm close, even with a few things to do, I'm close. But although I suspect I could get the whole shooting match out in January I just couldn't be certain. I know I seemingly fall from disaster to disaster but I made you guys a promise that I wouldn't be charging until Five was ready to ship and the thought that at the very last moment I'd get even that wrong wasn't something I could stomach. So a February release it is.

I was going to do some form of "fancy dan" trailer for it in January (and I suspect I will at some point) but if for some reason time precludes this (i.e. some poor testing results that need amending) then at the very least I'll pop together a small trailer of clips, especially of snippets from the lewds. I think it's only fair that if I'm going to put charging back on again you have at least some idea of what's coming your way beforehand.

Does this mean I'm worried about the quality? Far from it. These past few months have seen my ability in animating leap forward. I'm producing work I had no idea was even possible without massive studio software or prior experience. The little dev that could, has. The lewds are good. Very, very good. It was this progress that started the whole "Crikey, imagine this voiced..." thought train. I considered them good enough to hire actresses for and those that have seen them, even if only in part, agree.

Speaking of actresses, I'm pleased to say that I now have four working with me in order to try and ensure the best experience possible for you and so that each character has their own distinctive sounds and voice where appropriate.

The other bits - Chapter Four

So what happened to the standalone Four? Good question. It suffered from my late decision to have voiced and SFX scenes. In my defence I didn't actually expect a lot of my animating to end up as good as it did and so that perhaps justifies the late decision to expense a fair bit of cash on this late addition. But it did mean I needed to get a pile of the lewd animating out of the way as soon as possible so the actresses had time to do the work*. Given that these actresses are very much in demand I can't just drop work on them and expect an instant turnaround. My nightmare was having everything done except the SFX.

So Four in itself needs about a weeks work before it's wrapped. On the other hand massive chunks of Five have been done instead. All in all it doesn't make that much difference as it's Five which is the key delivery, that's the one we all want out.**

The other bits - Trisha

She gets her own standalone bit? She does indeed. For Mrs Jones, talks. There's been a bit of an experimenting for a certain path and some of you may well end up with a walking, talking, Trisha for one scene. I wanted to give this a good as a) I thought it'd be fun and b) to see if I could better lip syncing than Bioware. Turns out I can...

The other bits - The serious bits

Now you know me well enough to know I'm not going to suddenly drop a massive tonal change on you out of nowhere. But in Five there are some serious bits. However they are well flagged, easy ducked and will only come up if you actively choose to pursue them.***

Given that one of the guys teared up reading part of one of these scenes, and that my writing isn't that bad ( I don't write for the BBC after all), I'm assuming that the writing on these sections is pretty damned good.  So if you want a bit of drama in your mix it's there and pretty solid.

The other bits - how much is left to do?

There's that week on Four to wrap up which I'll do first now of course, but then it's really just animating and testing. My only concern at this point is having enough "powah" to get all the animations done. A lot have been of course but there is some still to do. But that's a question of raw output at this point and I've taken some pretty serious steps to resolve this. Without going into details, some things are being sold and another high end PC will be coming on stream. Let's just say I got fed up having a hand tied behind my back on this and went all in.

I'd still like to rebuild Annie's lewd in Two if I can squeak in the time but that's a "nice to do at some point" as opposed to an essential for the release of Five.

And I think that's about it.

I'm pretty sure I've missed tons and could, in fact prattle on for an age about certain scenes etc, but I don't think that would add much at this point. We're close. That's the key point. There's been times this past year when I really was doubting myself but now it's almost there, yeah, it's been worth it in terms of end product. But beGods no more remakes! Five chapters in a year was hell enough for anyone!

Take care, speak soon.

Notty

* Less in my defence, but with good intent, I did start getting carried away with the lewds. One scene started out life as a nice simple 400 frame loop - and ended up north of 5,000 frames... It is good tho! Promise!

** The irony here is that if I'd just planned to do it all in one big go as opposed to updated chapters it would have been done by now. Instead, with it being me, I made a bit of a hash of it by trying to do chapter updates. Still, I meant well.

*** I did consider having the conversation branches with warnings on the picks but, to be honest, I thought I'd be insulting your intelligence in doing so. So I didn't put them in. You don't need them.