Hello!

I'd been waiting to make another dev log until I finished the very long scene I've been working on for genuinely months at this point, but we're possibly still a couple of weeks out from finishing it and I wanted to try and give more frequent updates so didn't want to leave things any longer without a bit of an update.

As mentioned above, I am nearing the end of this exceptionally long scene at last. I'm now just two sections away from completing it, with each section containing roughly 30-40 renders or so each. This is an approximation, but if I assume another 80 renders will be needed to complete the scene, that'll take the overall scene's render total to ~450. For context, Chapter 1, in total, contained ~1400 renders. So, just this one scene in Chapter 2 is equivalent to one-third of the render total of Chapter 1. As I've mentioned before, this is by far the longest scene in the game so far, but even projecting forward there won't be many scenes as long as this. It's taken a great deal of work, and I'm both happy that I'm close to finishing it, as well as happy with the way it's turned out.

The work for the rest of Chapter 2 will speed up after this (I'm assuming - I can't imagine a future scene taking this long to load and render). The Chapter is about half finished, in terms of render count (my best guess at the moment is that the final count will be over 2500), but a lot of future scenes will take genuinely a quarter of the time to work through as the long scene did. So, progress will be quicker and I'll feel more comfortable giving more frequent dev logs because it will actually feel like I have progress to report on.

I've nothing new to preview with this post, so I'll leave things with a sincere thanks to the people who read this and have played and enjoyed the first chapter. If you had told me after releasing Chapter 1 that I'd only be halfway through Chapter 2 by the new year I'd have been disappointed in myself. So for those of you reading this who played Chapter 1 and are looking forward to Chapter 2 I want to thank you sincerely for your patience. I think that, especially with new projects like this game, frequent updates seem to be the best way of generating interest, and I fear sometimes that the long wait for Chapter 2 will lead to people forgetting, or not caring, about the eventual release. So, again, I do want to thank everyone who still holds the project in an optimistic light and are looking forward to Chapter 2 and beyond. I'm going to do my very best to not let you down, and make the game as good as I can, so that as many of you get as much enjoyment out of it as I hope you will.

Thanks!