April Progress Update (Patreon)

On the visual side of things, the chapter is up to 1601 renders, which is almost everything for the first release other than the Encounter.  Also spruced up a little over 200 of the renders from Chapter One, so it looks a bit better now.  Not quite up to the same quality as the upcoming release, but I think I'll tackle the remaining scenes that I want to touch up over the two releases following this one.  Finished encoding the videos for the first release's animations.  There are 41 files in total, made from six "main" animations with expression, pace, and camera angle variants.

On the code side, I've implemented a basic "Proficiency" concept for the spells.  I'll talk about my plans for that in the last section of this post.  I just started on the Scrying mechanic and expect to wrap up the initial version of that sometime tomorrow.

So, then, what's left to do before the release?  The major tasks remaining are: sound, shifting an event a bit later in the story, rendering and creating the data nodes for the Encounter, and polish/testing.  I've picked out some new songs already, a couple of which match up with scenes in the release, which is great.  There's only a few new sound effects for the release, thankfully.  Finding sound effects was by far and away the most tedious part of making the first chapter.  Finding halfway decent effects that suit the particular actions I wanted them for and were free/inexpensive and were clear for use alongside adult content was a lot more painstaking than I had thought it would be.  Finding music has the same difficulties, but that's at least fun to listen to much of the time.  There's one event in the upcoming release that I liked where it currently is when writing the script, but after rendering it out and playing through a couple times, it feels a bit early, so I'm pushing it back a day.  Work-wise, it won't be a lot: I'll be writing in a bit to replace said event, adjusting the dialogue in the scene I'm moving it to, and importing the relevant characters to the new scene.  I don't expect it to take longer than a day or two.  The Encounter is the largest chunk of work left to do.  It's a bit longer action-wise than the one in the first chapter, but it's more complex in terms of choices/branching and much more complex in terms of scene composition.  I don't have a good grasp yet on how long that will take, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took up to two weeks and added another 100 or so renders.  After that is the testing and polish phase.  As I test and play through the game, I mark areas that I feel need a little extra work, either in terms of writing or visuals.  I've identified a few such places already and fixed/tweaked some, but the bulk will be done during that final pass.  I'll probably announce the release dates either just before or sometime during that polish/testing phase.  Hopefully, I'll have that posted before the May progress update.  We'll see, though.

Alrighty, that's it for the progress update, so I'll loop back to the "Proficiency" bit for a moment before wrapping up.  As the name implies, the more the player character uses spells, the more proficient he becomes with them.  The magic in TNoM doesn't have "power levels", so the deciding factor in how effective a mage's spells are is how experienced, or "proficient", they are with them.  This system emphasizes that and will tie into the gameplay in upcoming releases, starting either in the second part of Chapter Two or in Chapter Three.  Right now, I'm conceiving it as something similar to what's in dialogue-heavy, light-action RPGs (Disco Elysium, for example): certain actions available based on proficiency and probably having different outcomes based on that level.  I'm not particularly fond of the notion of "game over", so there won't be anything like that.  In fact, I doubt there will be any "wrong" or "bad" outcomes, just different ways to reach the same goal based on what kind of mage the player is shaping their character to be.  It's still early days on that, obviously, so it'll evolve as I go.

That about does it.  Like I said above, I'm hoping to post the release dates for Chapter Two, Part One before the next progress update.

Thanks for the support and stay safe!