Hello!

Figured it was about due time for a little progress update on Chapter 3. This will be quite a short update, however, because there isn't really a whole lot to say at the moment. That isn't because I haven't been making progress, though; it's just been business as usual these past few weeks, working my way through rendering the visuals for the game.

I'm currently ~300 renders into Chapter 3, in just a little over a month of work. This is about what I aim for (with the time and hardware I have about 10 renders per day is a good average) but 300 renders a month would mean a 2400 render update in 8 months. This would be a significantly faster update than ch2 if I maintain this sort of speed, but it's always hard to predict how long things will take to pose and render. There's one particularly big scene in ch3 that will take quite a long time, and if each image in that scene renders slowly it could take months to produce. I just won't know until I get to it.

Last year, at around this time of year, I took pretty much two months off of making the game due to a combination of reasons including a busy personal life and issues with working on a slow-loading and rendering scene that felt arduous to work on. While I am once again very busy this time of year this year, the ch3 dev cycle won't contain such a long break from working on the game (at least I hope; you never really know what's going to happen). So I'm optimistically thinking that I'm going to be able to maintain this sort of development speed because this month or so since the release of ch2 has gone pretty smoothly, even with my slightly more limited free time.

The first Chapter 3 previews are attached at the top of this post. I'm very excited about this update, and the future of the game generally. We're still in the first phase, and the more I work towards the big, story-defining moments I've got planned the more eager I am to press on and reach those later parts of the story. But I can't rush through the foundation. Things have to be set up properly otherwise everything just won't work. I'm very hopeful that things are going to pay off nicely in the future when I get to them, but I've got to do my due diligence now so that it all makes sense and is earned in the future. I think everyone likes to think they've got great ideas, or can tell great stories, but you don't know if you're right until you put something out there.

Let's all hope that I get this thing right, huh?

Thanks as always