Chapter Two Development
Chapter One is in the rear-view now. I got some good feedback and have made some small additions/changes that will be a part of the next release. Nothing major, but I'm hoping I've made the back-and-forth aspect of Cerys and the player character's relationship clearer. I added a small, but fun, choice to tease her back a bit towards the end of the chapter when on her romance path.
On to Chapter Two, then. I'll be following the same general process I had for the first chapter: write the initial draft of the script (including notes about how each scene should be set up), copy/paste that into Ren'Py, create the renders/animations, and then add music and sound effects. Any coding that needs doing I'll knock out as I go, but the Chapter One work laid out a lot of the actual code (not including the "show this image" and "display this text" lines) that will be needed in the early chapters, namely the user interface and Encounters code. Chapter Two will have less new code added as a result.
As far as a time frame goes, Chapter One took roughly 7.5 months from initial concept to release, and clocked in at a hair over 1800 renders and 52000 words. That time period obviously included a fair amount of initial worldbuilding and a lot of learning. There'll still be a fair bit of both as part of each future chapter; this one in particular I'll be taking some more time to learn more about animating. I don't expect there'll be a drastic improvement in my skills in that regard, but at least some. With how positive the reception has been to Chapter One, though, I am considering "investing" in commissioning some animations for scenes in Chapter Two. If I try to do all the animations myself, I'll probably split the Chapter Two release into two parts so I can get the next version out to everyone quicker. In terms of how large/long the chapter will be, I'm going to play it safe and guess that it'll be a little larger than Chapter One. It'll cover a couple fewer in-world days, but with all the major characters in place from the get-go, there'll be a lot more to explore between them. I'll obviously have a clearer picture of how large the chapter will be once I wrap up the initial script draft, which will probably be at the end of January. I'll post progress updates once or twice a month, depending on milestones.
Before I wrap this up: thank you all for the support. The time I've spent on TNoM so far is the most fun I've had "working", and it's great that it seems like most folks had just as much fun playing it.