Public progress update and July Wallpapers (Patreon)

Just passing by to drop off the July wallpapers.

I fulfilled my first custom wallpaper request this month. The new influx of Patrons included someone willing to pay me that much 😊.

I went for a vampire/succubus theme for the wallpaper I came up with. I also decided to use a character who hasn't received much attention yet. I decided on her because she's receiving a lot of screen time as of my current Episode 2 script.

I've been purely writing for the past 2.5-ish weeks. Not just writing the script either, I believe I took off 2 days to plan the puzzle segment. Oh, right, public followers don't know about this yet.

The chapter I'm currently writing contains a puzzle segment, where you need to visit certain areas in a particular order and make decisions to further influence what options are available to you. It's not the most complex puzzle in the world, but there are multiple outcomes dictated by your decisions, with various consequences.

Writing is going well in terms of content. Episode 2's word count is currently 19.8% the size of Episode 1's. This includes comments and code so there is a margin of error in producing that number. But still, that's good progress.

Episode 2 is longer than Episode 1. Quite a bit longer, too. I don't know how this will affect development time. I'm still open about the progress I'm making. You can see the roadmap on my Discord server. I'm already planning a reduced amount of renders to help speed up production. I went over this in a Patron-only progress update, but the first 2/3 of Episode 1 had, for all intents and purposes, too many renders. I had to spend more time rendering just for frivolous shit like a subtle expression change that didn't need to be rendered. So render load is being reduced. 

I also spent maybe... I wanna say 1.5-2 months total doing shit like coding and UI stuff for Episode 1. I tried to make my code as scalable as possible to avoid having to painstakingly recode things in the future. So hopefully I don't need to spend too much time coding for this update, too. The only large coding implementation I can think of right now is adding image support to the phone screen, where images can be received and clicked to enlarge, it could also unlock wallpapers similar to free time.

As I said, scalable code. I already have a good idea of how I'm going to add this feature to the already existing phone code. So it shouldn't take too long, hopefully.

End of Update.

Thanks for reading and your continued patience. - Gary