Wow, has it been two weeks already?

Development is coming along nicely. 805 new renders in total for version 0.3 so far, and I’d guess I’m about halfway through Chapter 3. The biggest hurdle for me has been animation. For the scene I’m working on, it’s taken a good four days to build and render out one snippet, all for a paltry 2 seconds of animation. Daz Studio is good at many things, but animation is certainly not one of them. So I started to do the calculus of what it would take to forego animation altogether, stay on my current path, or learn another tool that might be better at such things and either integrate the results back into Daz or supplant it altogether.

Let’s put it this way. Change doesn’t look viable, at least for the short term. I want animation, but I don’t want to delay releases just to learn new tools, so I guess I’ll just need to keep plugging away.

Some of the comments I’ve received since v0.2’s release have been amusing. The trolls are easy enough to stomach–you just turn down the volume and let them bark. The tricky thing for me is hitting the sweet spot between telling a story, a meaningful one, and just catering to the whims of individuals who are brazen enough to ask (no, DEMAND) that your story supply their particular fetish. Or else…, I guess I don’t know what. Not play? Spend an excessive amount of time bad-mouthing it to anyone who will listen?

I had to laugh at one review: “There’s virtually no content in this release.” If all you’re doing is fast-forwarding through the VN to sex scenes that you find erotic to you just so you can fap to them, then I guess it is pretty short.

The prologue and first two chapters were simple because they were mostly just exposition. The MC makes a few decisions early on that seem innocuous now but can substantially affect the rest of the story. They just don’t seem that important–yet. The more branches a story takes, the more work it takes to flesh out each of those branches fully. One branch alone can up to double the amount of work required to tell the story. Start adding branches to branches, and…things can get out of hand very quickly. In Chapter 3, there are already passages that you won’t see if you’ve made certain decisions in the first two chapters.

From the outside, these decisions only seem innocuous because you can’t see yet where they lead. Like I’ve said several times, the story is written, so I have the benefit of knowing how it ends. And you will just have to wait and see. 🙂

An Android version will be available for the first time with Chapter 3. A beta version will be available for testing by select supporters in the next month or so, so if you’d like to test for me, send me a message.