Making this game is hard work.

Hey, there.

The response to the demo has been encouraging to say the least. I'd especially like to thank those of you that threw money my way as a form of support.

Development of episode 1 is progressing at a steady rate. So far, the amount of game that I have prepared is approximately the same length as the demo. While the demo was short, I implore you to sympathize with the fact that I am putting out a really high-effort game here. I attempt to make detailed renders, and the animations take a hell of a lot of my time.

Speaking of animations, I alluded to making a benchmark in my Patron-only Discord channel. I don't think I need to make one anymore, I've been going into detail with monitoring the bitrates of my encodes. This next part will go into some technical details that I'm sure only 2 of you will actually understand, so I'll put a tl;dr at the end for the laymen. I've been encoding the animations for Ren'Py, and because the original animations are so high-quality, I can actually MAX OUT libvpx-vp9's Constant Quality Factor to 63, and the end product on average, has a VMAF score of OVER 95. So I think I don't need to go any further as it is.

tl;dr - I can compress the shit out of the animations while still retaining an extremely high amount of quality. So the bitrates are manageable and any decent CPU can decode them at a reasonable speed.

Next up will be me answering an arbitrary question that I pulled out of the sky:

How long will updates take?

Short answer:

I don't know

Short but sweet answer:

I'd like to get a new episode out every 4 months at the longest

Long answer: 

It really depends on what is in each update. If you haven't figured it out by now, I want to make this game episodic. Each update will have a select amount of story, that ends when I want it to end. So there is no hard and fast rule. If you want me to take a wild guess, every episode will be around 1,000-1,500 renders, probably, I don't know. For reference, the demo had 289 renders including the animations. So each episode will be somewhere in the ballpark of 5x the length of the demo.

You also have to take the development cycle into account. It takes a long time to make a game like this. When I'm not writing, I try to get at least 30 still-image renders done a day OR at least 10 images +1 animation. Sometimes I can do more or less, depending on the complexity of the scene.

Then you need to include the writing. Writer's block is real. Predicting how long the writing will take is nigh-on impossible.

Then, there's coding and scoring. I need to bugfix and test my code, and take my time choosing the score, finding copyright-free material that suits my taste can be difficult.

Lastly, I need to take breaks.

I guess what I want to convey here, is that while this game can take a while to be updated; I am working on it as hard as I can while also making sure I don't overwork myself.

That's it for today's ramblings. I don't know if I'll make another post before the December wallpapers, that post will contain a dev update itself anyway.

If you want to talk to me, or just make sure I'm still alive or something, make sure to join the Discord. I'm friendly. I promise.