Dev Update 11/21/22 (Patreon)

Hey friends, how's everyone doing this week?

I'm currently in the middle of Brittani's big scene. It's a big one! Lots of potential dialogue/image combinations relying on the player's alignment, as well as their relationship with Gabby. And of course there's how you want to treat Brittani during the photoshoot - will you genuinely try to help her kickstart her career, or are you just doing it to see how far you can push her? Then there's the matter of her meddlesome boyfriend Jamie to contend with..

Currently, I've got 64 renders for Brittani's scene, bringing the current total image count for Chapter 4, to 450. I'm thinking that, by the time this scene is done, the total will land right around 600-650 renders. Once I've finished Brittani's scene, as well as the short scene right after it, I'll publish it as a mini-update. It won't be the full Chapter Four, but it'll be something to sink your teeth into while you wait.

Besides that, no news is good news! I've been learning more about lighting and speeding up render times, which hopefully shows. I largely retextured the set in Brittani's scene, and it's helped speed the renders up dramatically. I've also been experimenting with Daz's Layer Image Editor, allowing me to add images onto surfaces - as you can see with the graffiti in the second image up above. Might come in handy later, when Nicki wants to try some cover-ups for her tattoos..

And I'm still picking away at the unfinished pieces of the script for Chapter Four. To paraphrase an old saying, I'm trying to eat the elephant one bite at a time. I swore I was going to try to make this update more modest in scope, but I'm pretty sure it'll wind up bigger than the last one, at this rate. Whomp, whomp.

But, with the completion of this chapter, I'll have basically caught up to my original four-chapter draft, which I had when I began this whole project. I talked about this a bit at the beginning of the Patreon, but I originally had four chapters fully written and coded. The goal of which was to give me plenty of runway once I started the game. But, almost immediately I began to change things in Chapter Two, which then caused huge disruptions in the other chapters, and it was easier to just rewrite everything than try to salvage what I already had.

But, once the full Chapter Four is out, I'll likely publish my incomplete, text-only draft of the story as a little bonus. So you folks can see what might have been.

Alright, that's it for this week! I'm going to get back to work. Hope you folks have a great week! As always, thank you for your time and support!