CH4 STATUS UPDATE

Hey everyone, how's it going? It's been a while since I last updated here, so this status update will be a bit longer than usual.

Alright, starting with my absence: Patreon is starting to bring in some followers, which is great, but I’m still not making nearly enough to support myself, even spending as little as possible. Because of this, I had to take a break to do some freelance work and save up some money. I’ve managed to save enough for a while and hope it will be enough to finish this episode.

Now, onto what really matters: during this time, I didn’t completely put this episode on hold. I always set aside some time in the evening to work on the game, and I’ve managed to pose almost the entire episode so, let me explain a bit about my process

I work in three stages. First, I pose the characters without worrying too much about lighting or details. The goal here is to get the ideas out of my head and into a rough draft as quickly as possible, so I have a sense of what I'm working with.

The second stage is the initial polish. Here, I refine the poses, improve expressions, start working on lighting, add details, and create animations. At this stage, some better renders start coming out, and I can get a much clearer sense of the final result.

The third stage is the final polish (something I didn’t do before but will start doing in this episode). This is where I’ll refine textures, add background details, and enhance the environment — all those extras that aren’t essential to the story but make the game feel more alive. This is something I missed in the previous chapter and that will be crucial here because there are several scenes in places like clubs, for example, where it doesn’t make sense to see the background with no one else there. I’m not sure how my PC will handle this, but I'll find out soon enough.

With that said, the first stage is practically done. There are just a few scenes that I might repose because I wasn’t entirely happy with a few things.

So, this week I'll be starting the second stage. It’s the most time-consuming part of the entire process and usually where I spend the most time, but now that I’m fully focused, I should be able to speed things up and get back to weekly updates here.

That's it for now! There are a few more things I'd like to talk about, but I'll save those for the next update to keep this one from getting too long.

Thank you all so much, and sorry for the absence!