Dev-log June 16, 2024

Hey guys, it's time for another dev log.

I know most of you aren't too interested in anything other than the game, which is totally understandable so skip the next paragraph to get into what's going on with the development of chapter five.

The past few weeks has been a whirlwind of events, some good and some bad. Thankfully my mother is out of the hospital and she's doing a lot better now. Thanks to everyone who has wished her well, it means a lot. She lives with me now since she needs help changing her antibiotic through her PICC line and she has a lot of trouble walking, so she needs help doing a lot of things. It's funny how life circles around. Our parents take care of us when we're kids and eventually we need to reciprocate and the roles are reversed. You don't ever think about things like this when you're young, but time just flies by so all you young'uns out there enjoy your youth while you can. But I'm really happy she's getting better and out of the hospital at least. It was looking for a while that she might not be leaving, which was a scary time.

Development has been going smoothly, albeit slow. One of the longer scenes in this update requires a ton of video memory just for the environment asset alone. Because of this I have had to do multiple renders of each image and merge them together using Gimp. So three renders per image, plus I can only render on my main PC so I'm stuck rendering and unable to use my PC until each one is complete. This is because the scene requires close to 23GB of video memory and try as I might, I wasn't able to optimize this in a way that didn't significantly affect the quality. I really wish I didn't get stuck into this environment asset to begin with. I'll be more careful from now on and make sure vram requirements are low enough so I can render on my other rendering PC, which will leave my main PC free.

This update is going to have six scenes and contain about 700 renders. As I've mentioned in some of my other posts, this update will be less dark than chapter four, while still moving the story along. We'll see a new family member in this update, along with other familiar faces. As for an estimated release date for the first release on Patreon, I'm going to say it's probably going to be the first week of July at least. I know that is longer than the roughly two month release cycle I've been on up till now, but it is what it is. Hopefully I won't have as many distractions for chapter six. Thanks to everyone who voted in the poll last week. With regards to polls, please know that the results of polls like the last one will have an impact on the game going forward, but not drastically. 90% of you voted to give Kathryn the option to cheat, but this doesn't mean that you will be able to have her become a horrible cheating scoundrel. The story is already planned out, but there are some scenes I had considered where Kathryn could do some things behind Luke's back potentially. The results of this poll have helped me to decide to go ahead with them. Other polls which will be upcoming will involve less story and character writing specific things such as, outfits, hairstyles, etc. I will hopefully post a couple of these this week.

I want to thank all of you for the great support you've given me, allowing me to work on this game as more than just a hobby. Without all of you, I wouldn't be able to justify all the time I spend working on it. Hopefully we can keep this going and get this whole story done early next year. And maybe if things are still going well I can begin working on the prequel. I also have another original story that I will shop around to you guys late this year to get an idea of what you all think. Maybe that will be the next project, who knows.

Anyway, thanks again guys. I'll see you in the next one.

Bobby