July 10th - E5 Release (DevU #99)

Hi everyone, firstly thank you so much for how patient you've already been while I develop E5. I know that you're all itching for a release date and I've been avoiding giving one until now because it's been very difficult to estimate all that I have left to do. But I have now got a solid timeline for all tasks I have left. Although it's not soon, it is a date I can stick to that gives me adequate time for testing and polishing.

Early access for episode 5 will launch on Friday 10th July 2026. I know this date will be disappointing to all of you and honestly it's disappointing to me too. I really wanted to be able to release it sooner, especially given what I said about how I expected E5 to be quicker than E4 but unfortunately they're going to take a very similar amount of time in development.

I am sorry that E5 is taking longer than expected, but this date is the best I can do that gives me enough time to finish off all the content I have left as well as properly test it and make sure it's not a complete mess. As always, if any of you have recently subscribed hoping for a much sooner release date and would like a refund then please know that you can message me and will do that with no questions asked. The last thing I want is for any of you to think that I take your support for granted. I do not and I could not be more grateful for you. Whatever tier you're on and even if you only sub for the release month, I appreciate all of you.

As for some detail on why E5 is taking longer than I hoped, there are a few reasons I'll quickly go into:

• Visual Improvements

  • I've been working on some significant improvements in lighting and rendering techniques, both for new environments and for existing ones. I'm constantly learning as I work and I'm constantly looking for ways to improve Elmwood. Continuous improvement is one of my primary goals and I think E5's visuals will be a noticeable step up from previous episodes. Below is an example - I used to light the lecture halls with very simple, flat lighting that blurred out details (left). Now I'm being less of an idiot and capturing more detail with more realistic lighting (right).

• Longer & more detailed animations

  • E5 animations are quite a bit beefier than other episodes and they took me a long time to create. I spent so much time in Oct-Dec creating lengthy & detailed animations from scratch and not only did these take a while to design but they're still busy being rendered. Even if I had everything else finished, it would still take me at least two months to simply process all the animations I have ready in queue. The longest animation has about 1000 frames at 30fps which is just over 30 secs long.

• Brand new environments

  • Like E4, there are quite a few new environments coming in E5 and I've put a lot of work into editing these, both in terms of what's inside the room and what you can see out of the windows. Here's Taylor in the new cafe in the Elmwood student's union:

• Perk considerations

  • Earthquake will be unlockable in E5 which has required some specific attention to properly implement (testing how I want it to look, having the new notification system to allow for several simultaneous orgasm notifications etc)

So while I haven't ran into any major issues or anything, there's just a lot of areas where I'm trying to be ambitious and improve the quality of Elmwood overall. I hope that makes sense.

Thank you so much for your support, patience and understanding. I really appreciate this incredible community and I'm so grateful for your generosity that allows me to create Elmwood. And even if you need to pause your support until E5's release - that's ok too.

I will continue to show you some E5 previews every week and keep you updated with development to hopefully make the wait more manageable.

Thank you,

WickedWare