Dev Log 3.3: Plain Sight

Hello!

Work on the ch4 prelude is going smoothly. I'm working through rendering the opening two scenes at the moment. They're taking a little longer to pose and setup than typical scenes, because there are more camera angles, and in one more general movement of characters per render. So, while smooth, progress isn't exactly as quick as it could be right now. Though it is nice to get more intricate scenes out of the way early this time, as a lot of the later scenes are theoretically more simple (two character conversations, for instance).

Attached are the first previews of the update so far. I wanted to wait until I was further along the process before giving a preview, in the hopes that there would be a better variety to show, but I don't want to stall on previews for another week. So it's mostly of that first scene and a hint at the second.

On a personal note, I'm going to be out of the country for a week starting, well, today as you read this post. It's my first time leaving the country since 2019, so it's really quite long overdue. But this does mean I won't be rendering any images for a week. Don't worry, though, this doesn't work on the game will stop completely for the week.

I'll be taking my laptop with me and trying to get as much of the writing for chapter 4 done as possible. I don't know exactly how much I'll be able to do, as ultimately I'm not going to force myself to write if I hit a block with a scene, but I'm anticipating being able to write more than enough that I'll be able to really put my foot down and get through rendering a hell of a lot of complete scenes once I'm back.

Writing and rendering is a tricky balancing act at times, as I want to be posing scenes as much as possible and then write in the down time while they're rendering. So it might be a nice change in my workflow to be effectively forced into a week of pure writing. I'm just glad it's coming at the start of a dev cycle, where there's still a lot of writing to be done, and not at the end when the focus is much more on rendering.

When I'm back I'll be able to update and estimate exactly how long this update might take to come out. Assuming I've got a fair amount of writing done, at least. My estimates in the past have been optimistic, and I've generally been 1 or 2 months early in my guesses, which isn't ideal obviously, but hopefully I'll be more accurate this time around. I have a better understanding now of how long certain types of scenes take to render on average per image, so I should be able to ballpark a couple of numbers and give a rough estimate. I've previously guessed it'll hit around 2000 renders. If that ends up being true, I definitely think this will be the shortest release window so far. But as I say I'll assess this properly once I'm back.

Thank you all so much for your support as always! I'm already looking forward to being back and working next week!