Sheesh Naughty, how long can an update take?

I know, I know, right! I'm updating the progress bar in the latest info pinned post every week or so, but since a lot of us (myself included) are starting to feel itchy about the time it's taking, here's a little more info on what's going on this update and why it's taking longer.

This chapter takes place in some all new surroundings for the most part. That means that there's not a lot from the first four chapters that I can reuse or expand on as I did with previous releases. It all has to be created from scratch, from assembling the environments to setting up lighting, rendering out backgrounds and HDRI's from them, and placing the cast in them to act out the scenes. 

Characters also tend to interact more, which makes sense as the story progresses. In the past, quite a few scenes involved a character just standing in front of you talking to you, and there's still plenty of those, but there's also more scenes where the characters interact with each other, and with you. Those scenes take a lot more effort to set up, frame and pose out.

Complex scenes are also getting more complex. In the first few chapters, a complex scene might be a dozen or so different images of characters interacting, but consider the closing encounter between Macy and Denise from chapter 4: there were over 300 images added for their new interactions in that scene, and while that may be quite extreme, it's a good indication of the additional effort that now goes into those types of complex scenes.

So the obvious question is, do we need all that? Did we need to have this break from the last chapters, do all this extra stuff? I feel we do; we're raising the stakes in the story and this chapter should reflect that. And from what I'm hearing from a lot of you over on discord and the web is that you mostly feel the same way, and I'm grateful for your understanding.