Devlog #12: Schedules and Dragonites (Patreon)

As usual, for those with better things to do: new work schedule lets me work more efficiently, good progress has been made.Did you know that a +1 Extreme Speed, Life Orb, Tera Normal Dragonite with Helping Hands is a guaranteed 2HKO against a bulky Incineroar?Why do I know this? 'Cause this week I changed my work schedule and I've been playing some Pokèmon while rendering. For those worried about the dire state of my rig, proposed solutions and even reached out to get some updates, relax!I changed both banks of RAM and, after a clean DAZ reinstall, the crashes have stopped. The general slowness persists while rendering, but it's fine, I can work around slow.So what's the state of the update? It's going pretty well, all things considered. So well, in fact, that for the first time in over a month I took a day off today to just do nothing.I set myself some goals to meet in terms of numbers of renders for the week and I crushed those goals. The current render count is 634 out of the projected 800 (more on this later).But how? How did I get MORE work done than normal with a PC in worse conditions? New schedule!Instead of working in the afternoon and evening on the scenes that will be rendered during the night, I worked in the morning, rendered those scenes in the afternoon, then worked again in the evening and rendered those scenes, plus those that were left over from the afternoon, during the night.I don't know if this schedule is sustainable, I had a pretty "empty" week, but I'll try to use as much as I can.Now, what follows is light spoilers for Chapter 4, so you might want to close the tab here if you don't wanna see anything.For the rest of you, here's a simple graph of Chapter 4: This is a tree of the story/scenes progression of the chapter. The ones with a green dot are fully rendered, while yellow dots mean that I'm not 100% satisfied and either needs more work or potentially a rewrite (in Jess' case).As you can see there's a lot of green. I'm mostly set on what the "unrendered" scenes are going to be, except for 2:- Jessica was supposed to have a sort of mini-date, but this update is taking a long time and the pacing is already wonky as fuck, so I might just set it up and have it proper in the next chapter, maybe with more character development.- Sarah's date.Sarah's date is the big creative roadblock I'm facing with this chapter. I went through and wrote several ideas, but none of them left me satisfied. This is the big challenge I'll have to face next week but, once I'll overcome it, it'll (hopefully) be all smooth sailing from there. See ya next week!