May Progress Update (Patreon)

Mentioned it in the previous post, but I've wrapped up all the other major development tasks for the upcoming release and have moved into polish and testing.  Added sound, codex entries, moved that one event I mentioned in the last update, and rendered/coded the Encounter this month.  Total render count is now up to 1793, so almost as many as Chapter One.  It won't be quite as long play-time-wise, as a fair amount of those renders either have no dialogue associated with them (like the ones in the Encounter) or are combined into one "displayable" that is shown alongside one bit of dialogue.

Polish and testing will probably take longer than I originally thought, as there are five scenes I want to adjust the backgrounds in.  Two are in the patio area of the manor, and there isn't much to that map beyond the patio itself, so the backgrounds right now are a kinda low-res grass/forest skybox.  I'll add some actual grass, tree, and maybe building objects and retake/edit the affected shots.  Another two scenes have wonky shadows in a few of the renders, so I'll be fixing those and re-rendering/editing them.  And the last one is in the player character's room: the wall across from his bed has no décor on it, so it looks pretty flat and bland as-is.  I'll add some wall hangings and whatnot to at least give it a little flavor/texture.  That one will probably only need two or three actual renders taken since I should be able to just copy/paste the new stuff from said renders into the existing ones.  There's also a small, intermittent hitch in the "play video from position" system I added for Scrying scenes and changing expressions during animations.  It's minor enough (a few tenths of a second at most) that I wouldn't worry about it if it only affected the start of the anim, but it also seems to affect when the video loops, which sometimes creates a small jump.  I think this one is a result of how Ren'Py itself calculates the video position, but I'll have to look into it more.  The intermittent nature of the problem makes me think it's timer-related, and the function to get the current music/movie's "position" in Ren'Py's underlying C code looks like it's calculating that position based off a value updated in a periodic timer.  I haven't gone looking for that timer function yet, but I'm sure it'll only take a few minutes to find.  I won't let all that hold up the release to supporters, though, so if I have to adjust/add something to Ren'Py or change my design and it looks like it'll take a few days, I'll do it during the window between the Master and public releases.

Thanks for the support and stay safe!