Status update Episode 12 (Patreon)

Happy Friday!

This week, I've worked on many different areas of the episode. I continued playing Jill's branch, adding sound effects and music to scenes, and then restarted on the Others' branch.

I'm playing through with another strategy this time: stop wherever there are gaps and fill them with planned content.

That has resulted in me working on minor free roam events, adding phone content such as chats, clucks, and phone gallery images, and on tasks like writing new dialogue and posing art for scenes that didn't have any art yet.

I've just wrapped up some work on the Party Planning mini-game. It's actually been in a playable state since the early months of episode 12's development, but the sound and the party intro screen were missing - they are done now. I also took some time to add variations to the grid, playtested, and balanced the mini-game. I found both joy and frustration in how the party planning in episode 12 was made, and that's the sweet spot I was looking for.

Right now, I'm continuing to work through the episode while playing the Others' branch, and I've stopped to create static renders for a written canon scene. I will employ this strategy for the duration of this playthrough. I'm roughly halfway through the episode.

It's a wonderful feeling to play through a very long stretch of complete content, and I'm about to reach the point where content gaps are more frequent.

The animation queue is down to 105 animations. 11 of those animations are a bit of a pain in the ass to render because they are both longer than a standard animation and render much slower. I'm having 3 of my PCs render them to get them done; the rest are working on other animations that render 4-5 times faster per frame and are shorter.

If you missed it, I posted the first cluck of episode 12 on Bluesky/Twitter this week. Clucks are also available on my Discord server, if you'd prefer that. You can look forward to more clucks in the near future.

I'm truly sorry about the current drought of previews, but it's one of those episodes. Here's something I wouldn't post as a preview, but it might help you while you wait for the next one.

Have a nice weekend

Dr PinkCake