Dev Log : After a Christmas Break ...

Hey there - hoping everybody is well and you all had a good Christmas and New Year.

Work continues on Behind the Curtain, as it should - although I will admit to a little break over the Christmas period as I hinted at in my last Dev post. It wasn't a complete break as I was doing little bits and here and there when it took my fancy, but we're now back fully at it with over a 100 renders done this last week.

I'll be straight with you: Chapter 3 IS taking way longer than what I had in mind.

There are a number of reasons for this which I'll go into here:

• Quality. Without blowing my own trumpet - I take my time when building scenes, characters and images so that I can present high quality. I might not always hit the levels I want to or could - but I make sure every image and scene is the best I can make of it. That takes time. And when every line of dialogue has it's own render (90% or so of lines in Chapter 2 and nigh on 100% in Chapter 3) - that's a lot of rendering! Add in animations .. It all adds up!

• Sucker for Detail. Whether that's detail in the images and environments or detail in the story and the character arcs. I plan everything out to the nth degree and, if needed, keep re-writing until it's the best I can make it. Hopefully, you'll see the benefits of this when we release Chapter 3 - certainly in the dialogue and storytelling. And with the introduction of some ... significant .. characters into Chapter 3 who have only been mentioned previously - I have to be sure to get them and their introductions right.

• Narrative Branches. When a game has choices - those choices have to matter. I included Ironman mode into BtC so that those choices that you as players make DO matter. You, as a player, has to think about the consequences because you can't go back. And as such - those choices have to have a pay off. There are branches in Behind The Curtain of significance. I mentioned in an earlier Dev Post about how one choice can lead down three different branch's of the story with the branch's being 8 minutes, 17 minutes and 7 minutes each. And each of these branch's will lead to other branch's (and oh shit! moments) later in the story. Again .. These take time.

• Coding. I'm a coder by trade and so there's a lot of coding that goes on under the skin that looking from the outside - you might not see. For instance - Chapter 3, Scene 1 has nearly 2,500 lines of code .. Yes, some of it is dialogue and housework - but there is a shit-ton of code there too. In addition, due to the branch's mentioned above - there are a lot of flags that get set in the VN so that your choices are remembered and acted upon later. So many, now - that I've had to build a dedicated Dev Screen to a) Keep track of them all and b) change them on the fly in game when testing different conditions and narrative branch's.

• Adding Scenes. Yeah .. I know .. this one is on me. I do tend to take 2 steps forwards and 1 step back every now again and add in scenes that weren't either initially planned or considered. Now I'm not just adding stuff in for the sake of it - it's because upon reflection - It's needed (See "Sucker for Detail" above!). Since I said we were on the last stretch in my last Dev Post - I've retrospectively added in a couple of scenes that I decided were needed to make later scenes a) matter and b) more significant.

• Other Stuff. Maybe not much of your concern - but Behind the Curtain isn't my only thing that I do to help pay the bills. For those who didn't know - I run a Daz 3d Tutorial YouTube Channel which I have to keep on top of and do a lot of basic everyday art that I post on various galleries around the interweb .. check me out on DeviantArt if you haven't already .. A mans gotta pay the bills!!! So I got to keep on top of this other stuff too .. not to mention normal day to day real life stuff.

The end IS in sight .. I promise!!

It's just sometimes I go round the hill and down to Dingley Dell on my way to it!!