Status update Episode 7 (Patreon)

Happy new year!

I hope you're feeling well today and that 2021 brings good things for all of us.

Let's kick off the new year with a status update!

It's been two weeks since the previous one and there's been considerable progress. I did take a few days off, but I've been working a lot as well.

PCs have mostly been rendering animations but also some static renders.

I've been doing bits of everything, and I will have to focus on writing and coding in the near future.

I've reached a point in the development where the PCs will intermittently be idle and not rendering. 

Earlier, I've mentioned how manual labor will be the new bottleneck, as I've upgraded my GPUs, and that's exactly where we are right now.

It's a good thing, really. It means that I can produce the content I want without having to worry too much about rendering time.

I haven't posed every animation in the update yet, so the PCs will soon be working hard again, but I need to write more of the script before I know for sure what remains in terms of animations.

So, the current state of the development is that:

149 animations and 1340 static renders have been produced.

9 licensed songs, 2 CC0 songs, and 7 sound effects are added thus far.

Despite the high animation and render count, I have a lot of manual work left on this update.

As you can see, I have been focusing hard on posing animations, which means that other areas of the development have been left for later.

Writing, coding, and posing static renders will be the time-consuming tasks for development starting now.

I cannot accurately estimate how far along I am with the script, but the main script has 6125 lines of code, best compared to episode 6 with ~11000 lines of code.

I have also made good progress on an updated feature that I vaguely mentioned in the past and will reveal it a bit later in the development.

This week I started on a huge and fairly complex free roam event, and it will take a long time to fully code and complete it.

All in all, great progress has been made and the episode will be a meaty one once it's completed.

I estimate that the overall progress for the update is early to mid-development (30-50% complete); I can't estimate it better than that.

I have some other good news for today.

I'm not sure how many of you have noticed this, but there's been an increasing amount of lag in the game as it is growing in size.

It's been most noticeable during animations with choices.

After spending some time debugging this and even getting insight from RenPy Tom, I'm really happy to announce that I've fixed it for the entire game.

This fix will roll out together with the next update.

Poll news

There was a poll for 2D art that ended during Christmas and the winning combination was a frontal shot of Sage in lingerie + nude. I have ordered this art piece for episode 7.

There will be more polls to come during January.

Have a nice weekend and a great start to 2021!

Dr PinkCake