Progress Report 24-02

Ahh... The end is near.

The third chapter of the story has proven to be quite the undertaking. As I'm (finally) closing in on completion, I'm ready to announce the projected release date...

March 7th

What's taking so long? There's two main reasons for the lengthy development time: the overall size, and the huge rewrite the episode needed from the original outline. The increased size is mainly due to the rewrite. So why was there the need to do it?

The original outline for Ep3 had the major event of the card tournament, and for the plot to revolve around that. But once I began work on the episode I realized it was missing something important... significant movement with the core storyline: Kayla.

Yup. You, Kayla. It's your fault.

So rather than having the card tournament take place near the end of the episode, it was moved toward the middle to allow more story progression afterwards and fit in the stuff it was missing.

Things that were planned for later were moved up, and some things I wanted in Ep3 have to be pushed back due to the size. It's a busy couple of weeks for the MC and I had to make sure all events fit comfortably.

One thing some fans have voiced is they'd like to have more content with the LIs. I want more of that, too, but not at the expense of moving the story along at a fair pace. With that said, there's more time with LIs packed into the second half of this episode than what we've seen before. Still, the MC is quite distracted with a lot of life events happening with only a few weeks until graduation, so he does not have unlimited time.

But don't blame Ami for any of those distractions.

For anyone curious about the episode size, I just finished revisions up through Scene 45, and it totals about 44k words and 1300 images. So that's already the size of Ep2, and there's about 15 more scenes to wrap it up.

-ckr