September Progress Update (Patreon)

Quick and dirty: wrapped up the first pass through all the content for the next release, so it's "playable".  Might be about 80% of the way through the work for the release, so still a bit left to do.

Mentioned it in the previous post, but this release will stop just before the ball.  It'll be a bit of a respite between the "event" at the end of the previous update and the inevitable intrigue of the ball.  More lessons and dates with the wards and more time with the ginger Trinity.  It'll probably be a little longer line-wise in the Ren'Py script than the first release of Chapter Two, but have fewer renders.  Mostly since there's no giant friggin' Encounter and only two full QT scenes instead of three.  There'll be three of the new 'mini scenes', though.  The ball will probably only have the one full QT scene that's currently written in, but I'd like to add a couple fun minis there, too.  There are a couple other scenes I'll be adding to the ball to flesh it out and bring it up size/length-wise to the other two Chapter Two releases.

So what's left to do?

First thing is tweaking the animations I'm working on myself.  There's three this time, and while I'm happy with the progress, they're not quite as 'natural' as I'd like them to be.  I don't expect I'll get them to quite the same quality as the three I had commissioned, but I'm learning a lot by studying the scenes worked by the animator I commissioned them from.  It's less arduous than I expected, thankfully.  Might turn out that I do most of the animations myself in the near future, which is probably for the best.  Still won't be doing quite as many as other AVNs do, but I'm happy with that.  I'd rather have a few (good) animations and faster releases than a lot of (also good) animations and slower releases.  So I'll be tweaking what I have and then rendering all of them over the rest of the week.

There's a number of various TODOs left: some tweaks to the UI for android, text box and outline sliders, dialogue tweaks, a couple render fixes, etc.  Shouldn't take more than a few days to finish those.

I'll be tackling the top 2-3 choices from the extra tasking poll, which looks like it'll be the character detail screen outfit bit, adding a toggle to always display the pronunciation text, and improving the animations in Cer's first QT scene.  Might not get to all of the animations in that scene this release, but I'm definitely going to take a stab at the two for the real 'meat' (heh).  For the others I might just revert them to static renders for the time being rather than that pseudo-animated ATL transform bit I'm currently using for them (which is really just a series of renders shown on a loop).

Along with the above, I'll be tweaking the early-game exposition a bit.  Namely, making a couple parts more 'show' rather than 'tell' and adding another choice or two to get the slimmed-down explanation.  I know some folks are really enjoying the lore and world-building, so I won't be taking anything out, just hopefully presenting it in a more entertaining (or brief) way for those who are more interested in the characters and/or plot.

I'll probably be sending a release out for testing/proofreading to Weavers (well, the one Weaver plus Howl the Proofreader) while I tackle updating the animations for the "Hey" scene.   I'll make a post with the release schedule once I have a clear idea on when the Master release will be ready.

As always, thanks for the support and stay safe!