Chasing Sunsets Chapter 4 Dev Update 1

It's time to do that thing again!

Most big efforts are really many small ones pulled together, and developing a visual novel is no different.   Reflecting back on the lessons learned in previous chapters, we're doing things a little bit differently this time.

• Writing and rendering in story order
• Integrating art as we go rather than at milestones
• Playtesting as we go, rather than at the end

Additionally, we've had a few administrative and technical victories over the past week.  We were having problems with facial morphs on actors "changing" between the posing phase on Kent's rig and the actual rendering on mine.   We've identified the root cause of that and corrected it.

We've also trimmed down our asset libraries and eliminated bloat, resulting in faster load times and snappier DAZ response.   We figured the update to release version 4.15.0.30 presented a good opportunity to update and iron out any wrinkles in our art workflow, and that has been a big success.

Three scenes are now complete with art and posing is underway for the fourth (and largest) scene of the chapter.   Scene 3 tipped our per-image render time record of nearly 3 hours per image, but that is thankfully behind us.   Looking at the images produced, we certainly feel it was worth it!

Mallory's custom tank top for this chapter is complete (It was "Talk Nerdy To Me" in Ch3) and my experiments with bad weather transforms in Ren'Py have paid off with a little bit of extra immersion due to the visual effects.

At this point, I'll keep setting up the scenes and Kent will keep knocking them down.   We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we're excited about where the story's going.

In the meantime, sit back and relax while we work on what promises to be a hotter-than-usual spring in the South Pacific.

Our Discord is now boosted to Level 3, so feel free to share our server with any friends you think will enjoy our story.

We've also tied Discord activity to new custom roles to encourage theorycrafting, discussion, and feedback.

As always, thanks for bearing with us through the development phase, and know we're as excited to get this out the door as you are to see what we've been up to!