Ultimate (or penultimate) development update

I haven't decided yet.

It's Joever, it's finally Joever. The script is (mostly) fully written, the episode is (mostly) fully rendered, and audio is- wait...

Yeah, there is no audio yet, this is one of the final steps. Don't underestimate how long scoring takes. It shouldn't take me longer than a month, seeing as it didn't last time. Plus I have some sound effects that I can re-use from episode 1.

Then it's all stragglers. Hunting for typos, rewriting passages that don't sit well with me, and I'm sure there are a handful of render/anims that need to be re-rendered for certain reasons (usually AO artifacts which have been my biggest issue this episode).

I'm absolutely not posting release dates yet as I have totally lost all confidence in my ability to predict my performance. So that's the to-do list: play through the episode adding sfx/music, fix typos as I go along, take note of renders/anims that need to be fixed and then redo them, tweak the script where I deem it necessary, and finally a little bit of coding. Hopefully, I'm not a big dumb dumb and can squeeze images into my currently working SMS screen. And hopefully, that should be it. I genuinely can't imagine anything outside of acts of God that would be dramatic enough to interfere with this process.

I'm going to take tomorrow off anyway, I need to compress all the images and re-encode all of the animations to VP9. Scoring sucks, btw, like really sucks. Delicately searching for sound effects and songs, then adding them to the game all synchronized and shit is completely draining. But the fact that I only want to pay for one month of licensing subscription is a motivator.

This release is generally larger than Episode 1, it has fewer chapters but I went for a more wordy approach, fewer micro-expressions or head-tilt type renders. I've explained before but this is mostly to make development a little quicker by trying to cut out the more frivolous renders.

Before the tweaks I'm inevitably going to make, the word count is 54,559, and the render count is 2,031. There are 104 animations totalling 16m 26s of footage.

As long are you're not in the immediate vicinity of a swimming pool, this episode looks downright beautiful in some areas, I'm excited to show it off to you.

So there you have it. Keep sitting wherever you are and PauseChamp until I tell you it's go time!

Thanks for sticking with me.

- Gary