It's the "Two posts in one day" update...

Hello!

Just a quick update (although we'll see how quick it is by the time I get to the end. You know me...).

Chapters Three and Four

First off the bat, I'd planned to get all the bug fix work done this past week but I'm afraid I haven't. I've hardly touched it in fact. Not because I've been lazy, more because it dawned on me that if I wanted the new polished animations voice acted (and there's quite a few of those) then I needed to have those sorted sooner rather than later so the actresses would have sufficient time to do their part. It'd be a bit raw of me to drop half a dozen animations and expect them VA'd in a week. So it's largely been a week of animating instead to avoid any delays to Chapter Four.

As to the buffed animations....well, the reception has been positive so far. More than in fact. Regular long suffering readers will be well aware I loathe the image and animation quality of what I put out. That I feel it's never quite right or good enough. Well, for once, it IS good enough. It's really good. Really. Those that have seen some have been pretty impressed. I'm not an advocate of asking you to replay anything just because I've been messing around in the innards of the game but this time around I'm going to strongly suggest it. Throw in the VA on top* and the lewds in Four are rather corking and well worth a watch. Oh, and I replaced Annie's dance. I missed it off my list of things I was going to change in Four last week. God knows how, given it was in the earlier trailer.

So where does that leave us progress wise? Well, Three could still be ready next week as opposed to this, but Four isn't far behind it. The progress planner for Four says the week commencing the 20th November. Of course there's many a slip between cup and lip (and especially the way I drink) but one of the benefits of having someone stepping in to keep me organised is...um...well, I'm more organised. I'm still not exactly a "lean, mean, dev machine" (see above, for example) but I'm less of a chaotic one for sure.

Given that the gap between releasing Three and then Four, on paper, is only two weeks I'm not going to release a separate Three and instead go for one big drop of both of them by the end of November. My rationale really is the time spent on making the builds and compressed builds for Three will really only end up delaying Four, and I want that bugger out of the door asap so we can focus on wrapping up Five. That's the chapter we all want shipped after all.

Chapter Five.

I was mulling over this a lot over the past week and I've decided that it will be a January release. December is feasible, but throw in the Christmas period, the fact it's huge, that I want it bug free and it needs a fair bit of voice work, I think going for December is just asking for it to have something wrong with it - and after all this work, I'm sure you'll appreciate that's the last thing I want. I rather want it to land with a bang and not a sad splat. Especially as it is the best work I've done. I don't want it short changed by rushed errors. 

Chapter Six.

Oddly enough some work on Six has already happened. Some script was done a bit of go but also, due to some shuffling around of content between Five and Six, it already has some scenes done and even had a bit of animating done for the "Supah Sekret Project" element in that chapter last week. This was really only to test if the elements set up in Five would actually work nicely in Six but even so, it's had some animation work done as well.

Other news.

After a bit more code wrestling, I've decided to take out the music player and replace it with an orders summary screen instead. The one you get at the end of the game, that one. I did work out why the player wasn't working the way I wanted it to in the end but fixing it would make the PDA prone to crashing, especially on roll backs, and that's not a price worth paying I'm afraid. Still, it cuts the file size down a bit so there's that?

Also, no car crashes this week so....progress!

And finally...

I appreciate not dropping a separate Three and making you wait for the combined Three and Four will be a disappointment, but given the closeness of the two drops, and how by not making the various builds for Three (with all the checks and code re-writes it requires for the compressed version) could buy me a week of time, I hope you understand my rationale.

Notty

*Not all of her, just her voice.