Good and bad news this report. Chapter 7 static content development has almost concluded. This has been the hardest chapter so far, for a variety of reasons. We revamped a couple of scenes so that you wouldn’t be left with no content if you chose particular actions. Doncha just hate it when a new version of a game comes out and it looks like there isn’t any new content because of choices you’ve made in the past? (Looking at you, AWAM…) There are story branches, but because of the way they’re implemented, we haven’t had to double or triple the amount of code to support them.

Why “almost” concluded? Our development pipeline includes a very important tool: Iray Server. It’s software designed to offload renders to a separate machine so that computers aren’t blocked from further scene development work while rendering is taking place. Unfortunately, for some reason, Iray Server has stopped working. Not 100%, but on a random basis. It seems to depend in large part on the content of the file being rendered. It’s random, and hangs the server when a render gets stuck. Because we can’t count on the server to do the work, we’ve had to revert to manually compiling on the individual editing machines. This has slowed down the process tremendously.

Iray Server was an expensive bit of kit when we bought it, and we got stellar customer support. Now, of course, it’s free, and support is nowhere to be found. We’ll probably have to come up with a new pipeline process for the remaining chapters, but it’s too soon to think about it.

What do we mean by “static” content? (Almost) all standard renders are done. All that’s left are the animations still chugging through Snax’s machine. Luckily, this time around there aren’t any long animations (relatively speaking) but at anywhere from half an hour to three hours per frame, even a 5-second animation can take 150 frames to realize. (And thus, 75 to 450 hours…)

There’s still a handful of static renders and about two week’s worth of animation renders to go, but in the meantime we can continue on the full app re-editing process. Seven chapters (plus prologue) will take a while to go through.

To that end, we’ve tentatively pushed Chapter 7’s general release out to mid-November. As usual, the Patreon/Subscribestar release would be a week before that. For work left, there’s the re-editing, building the Android version, quality control for all of the images and animations, doing a final edit on the script, and beta testing.

As always, welcome and thanks to all of our new supporters this month! Come visit us on our Discord server!

Cast your eyes upon these snapshots, embodying the essence of our latest fortnight’s toil. Take pleasure!