The update is delayed. 😭

Hi!

How many times have I promised myself not to give specific deadlines or make promises?

Many times!

And every time, for some reason, I still do it! I promised it around the 30th, and I’m not going to make it...

I’m sorry! I repent and humbly sprinkle ashes on my head.

Reasons:

1. I'm not good at estimating the amount of work properly, and I often overestimate what I can handle. It's honestly my constant mistake. This time specifically, I started making the animations way too long. And they took more time than they probably should have. I think the animations turned out pretty good, of course, but I could’ve made them simpler without losing much quality.

   Then it turned out that I hadn't fully finished writing the dialogues for the final scene, and there’s a story choice there that DOUBLES THE NUMBER OF ANIMATIONS FOR THIS EPISODE! And I was like, "Oh, mamma mia!"... So yeah, there are 25 animations in one update... And I still haven’t made all the camera angles I wanted to make... So by release, this part will probably get around 5 more animations with different angles, like POV and stuff like that. But doing them now would mean waiting almost another week just for them to render.

   So yeah, this is probably the first time I’ve seriously hit the limits of my computer’s power since upgrading the hardware a year and a half ago.

2. I think I may have mentioned this already, but I’m not sure. There were a lot of lighting issues, and those issues showed up in the animations. The render ended up with these kinds of “fireflies” all over it. So I had to re-render them... Some animations are 300+ frames, and each frame takes about 3 minutes to render, so that’s 900 minutes total — 15 hours of continuous rendering for just one animation. And since I can’t work on new renders during the day while rendering at the same time, all renders have to be done at night, which means 2 full nights. And there were several animations with these problems... So yeah... it was painful. I even left one animation with a small bug — you’ll see how it looks in the game. I’ll fix it later in the release version of the game, but right now there’s just no time, and this has already dragged on too long. Example of that kind of bug:

3. I had a small move that ended up eating up almost a full week of work time.

4. Some friends came over on the weekend and invited me out for beer... then I felt awful the whole next day after our little “relaxation” together 😅

Long story short... I’m still working on the update, but I won’t give any deadlines so I don’t screw up again. But we’re not talking a month 😅 It’s not that bad...