Update #98 Shady shaders

Hey, you! Yes, you there with the great taste in games and fancy eyeballs. I don't actually know where I was going with this, so I'm just going to quite while I'm ahead.

So, I did finish the scene I was working on, but I didn't get further than that. Been some real annoying crashes. Well, they're not even really crashes. It's just the shaders going all wonky on me and then I have to restart. At least I think it's the shaders. Every time it takes just a minute or two, and then another minute or two to fiddle with some settings that don't get saved properly.

It's not a lot of time lost, but it drains my enthusiasm ever so slightly every single time, and it adds up.

D-d-d-double shadow!

Bit tricky when all the previews I have from the week are from a spicy scene. I don't want to show too much, I'd like to leave a little something to the imagination you know.

In the end, I'm happy with the buildup of the scene, and there's some pretty fancy renders if I may say so myself. By the end I lost patience so I feel like it ends a bit too quickly. I might go back and add an extra animation, or a few extra renders, or something. Maybe I'll feel like it tomorrow.

Well, going forward there's three simple scenes in a row, so that'll be a nice break. Then the two final scenes are bigger. One spicy, and one big finale to the episode. I hope for less shader nonsense when making those.

Watch the tusks, please.

Now, I make no promises and I'm not going to hold myself to it. But given the amount of stuff left to do, I'd expect a release sometime in June. Especially since I only have about a month left of uni. Once that's done I'll be free to focus on the game for the rest of summer.

Here's hoping I actually manage to pass the course, I'm still behind there as well.

I need university courses to have ratings so I know what I'm getting into beforehand. That way I could pick and choose the ones where all the reviews talk about how lazy you can be while still passing. To be fair, I do enjoy studying creative writing even when the course is rough, much unlike when I studied computer science. On the other hand I would've never learned any programming from the easy courses, so maybe it was for the best.

Shadow, shadow on the wall, who's the barest of them all?

Soon it'll be time to start coming up with what's supposed to happen in the next episode as well. I do have some ideas, but they're quite vague at this point. I probably need to start properly moving towards an ending. I've been contemplating which episode might be the last, episode 10 is a nice and round number, but I also really don't want to make an ending that feels rushed.

I think landing a solid ending for a story is extremely important. The feeling the ending leaves you with is going to heavily color your opinion of the entire thing. That's how stories work in every medium. I do have a pretty solid idea of what the ending is supposed to be and it rings true to me. But that's no guarantee that it's going to ring true for others, or that I'll be able to make something that lives up to what's in my head. At least I can't make a worse job of it than Mass Effect 3, so that's a small comfort.

Anyway, that's about all my wordiness for today.

Thank you so much for your support, and I wish you a nice and lazy week!