Episode 24 status update (Patreon)

Hi folks,

An update on episode 24 status:

Artwork is 100% complete, including animations. 

Writing / coding / branching...I would estimate at 85% fully complete.  Although there is a good chunk of that that still needs to be QC tested, but I have done lots of testing myself and I'm confident enough that any fixes/errors the QC team find will be very easy fixes. So I'll just do a few more run-throughs and I'll aim to get that over to the QC team in one week.

With 15% of writing remaining:  5%  just needs to be tidied up, so I expect that to also be passed over to the QC team in a week. So, in one week, we should be fully tested  / ready to go on 90% of the game.

The remaining 10% of writing - I have a fairly decent outline already mapped. From a complexity / branching perspective it is probably at the mid-point on the difficulty scale compared to the rest of the scenes in this episode, so it shouldn't be too much of a pain. 

If everything goes perfectly, that will probably take me another two-three weeks to complete. So all things considered, looking at an approximate (optimistic) 3-4 week lead time to release.

As far as overall episode length (in terms of number of lines), it will probably be on a par with episode 23, which was the largest episode by far (see the episode line counts below).  Although one thing to bear in mind is that a single play-thru may seem shorter  - This is because of the amount of branches I had to complete in episode 23 (Many scenes had 3 or 4 distinct blocks of writing depending on which woman or combo of women, you have chosen.)  Writing the same scene for many different variations was horrible (and boring) to create, but it's my own fault for giving so many different combinations of women.

Also - As I re-wrote scenes in this episode (many times) I removed a lot of the general dialog choices (e.g. romantic / angry, options, etc.) that players would be familiar with from previous episodes. So episode 24 has a lot less of these minor choices. My thinking behind this is that at this stage of the game, it is pretty trivial to score minor relationship points (by picking the right dialog choice) for girls that the MC has been dating for so long.  So I felt that continuing some of these petty dialog options was redundant.  However, the choices that ARE in this episode, will (in a lot of cases) be more significant and impactful (as we approach the end-game).  And some decisions from previous episodes may come back to haunt you (or may end up helping you.)

And to finish on some interesting (or maybe not) info about the overall length of WTHI (I almost vomited when I checked some of these stats - next game will be shorter, I promise.)

So far, WTHI in total has 868,568 words in it's script.  That's more than "War and Peace" (587, 287),  the entire Lord of the Rings series, including The Hobbit (576,459 total count), the King James bible (783,137), although it's a little shorter than the entire Harry Potter series (1,084,170).

So for anybody that quickly hits their keyboard, without reading just to look at the pretty pictures.... Shame on you! :) :) :)  But it's your choice! :)

As always, let me know your comments and questions below and I'll get back to everyone.

Thanks,

CG