Kicking off chapter 7 development

Well let me start with wishing you all a happy New Year. 

Last year was a pretty crazy year in many respects, and it was doubly so for Light of my Life. Chapter 6 finally saw the light in in December, and with the aftermath, fixes and cleanup, ended up tallying up well above 2.6k hours of work in all (a running tally of time spent on Light of my Life is shown in the bottom right of the progress infographic). 

What's been happening?

I took a little bit of downtime over the holidays, but I've already been blocking out chapter 7, figuring out which events should take place, and where the story will take us next. 

The process is a bit different from the previous chapters, as by now we've ticked of quite a lot of the things I'd planned in my initial drafts for the game, so we're sailing deeper into uncharted territory from a writing perspective. But that's just as well, as the characters have grown quite a bit over time and by now might act and react very differently to how I thought they would when I started out. 

But it does mean there's a bit more work figuring out what will happen in some cases.

New infographic

The resulting infographic for chapter 7 is what you see above. It's a little different from the last time, as I wanted to have a way to differentiate between simple and complex scenes, and I've tried to do so by having stacks of faces for each scene. The higher the stack, the more complex the scene. 

I hope that'll allow me to give a better indication of how work is progressing, and avoid the nastiness at the end of chapter 6 where basically everything was complex and it looked like work had ground to a halt (which was anything but the case).

It is a bit of a first draft; while I have most of the scenes thought out in terms of what I want it to convey and how complex I figure it'll be, I'm not entirely happy yet with how it all comes together, so you might see some changes still in the next versions of this infographic. 

So what's next? 

Well, obviously, I'm just about ready to start production work in earnest, even if there's still a few things story aspects that need some more writing and plotting. I might finish up writing up the overall arc first, or I might pick up a scene or two from the start while I let some ideas stew, we'll see.

You can also expect a final version of chapter 6 very soon, which will have another bunch of typos and very minor bugfixes, some added robustness against out of date mods, and a few touch-ups on older renders in earlier chapters.