We just finished scene 8 yesterday. Whew. That was an important milestone because our rendering server is getting a major upgrade this weekend. Assuming everything goes according to plan, we should be back to the grindstone on Monday.

The upgrade was triggered by a few renders that happened earlier in the week which took upwards of 6 hours each to fully render. Yes, there are a lot of ways to cheat the system, but the level of quality we’re going for demands that we take the time. So our rendering server (Ryzen 9 5950X, RTX 3090, 64GB RAM) is having most of her internal organs either ripped out or doubled up (Ryzen 9 5950X because that’s still the fastest CPU we can support with the AM4 motherboard we’re using, TWO RTX 3090s, 128GB RAM, 1600W power supply, and a new water cooling system because, well, TWO RTX 3090s…)

Fit and finish work has continued. There are numerous subtle display changes that won’t effect gameplay going forward, but should help new players better grasp what’s happening, when. Things like thoughts, mood descriptions, phone conversations and the like are getting a different look and feel (oh, all right, different colours). We’ve also changed the way that memories are portrayed to make it clearer that what’s being seen isn’t present day. We’ve had some questions in this area so we figured it couldn’t hurt to make it more plain for the casual viewer. PyTom has also added our requested change to Ren’Py 8.1 which should (knocking on wood) be available before we ship Chapter 5.

The jukebox is coming along. A lot of effort has gone into automating the process, so no matter what we add to the VN in the future, we won’t have to rewrite the jukebox to accommodate it.

Last call for the credits display. If you don’t want to be credited, please send us a message before the end of January. We’ll use your name as listed in your profile – if you’d like something else, please let us know soon.

We have been saying “10 scenes” for Chapter 5 since the beginning. That’s . . . a little white lie. We split up one of the longer scenes into two, proportionally smaller ones to help further the story along. So we really have 2 1/2 scenes left. We’re going to be cutting it close with a February release, but we’re not moving the deadlines. Yet. Stay tuned.

The usual couple of renders from the last two weeks. Thank you all for your continued, generous support, and cross your fingers that the server upgrade goes without a hitch!