Progress Update 1

Woooooo! So it begins!

This is the first progress update for the Episode 4. If you are new here, basically I ramble about what progress has been done towards next release, and also some other stuff if they influenced the progress. Let’s dive right into it!

As always, first irl related stuff. And it’s quite important. Probably most know that I am still a student, and my next, which is the last, year of uni just begun. There is no sugarcoating the fact that it’s gonna be difficult, especially as I don’t live in the same city, and have to travel 3-4 hours daily. The next few days I’ll get a lot of important uni related information, which will give me some insights in how things will progress.

This of course doesn’t mean anything terrible, but for sure I cannot promise a fast update time, as it will be similar to Episode 3. After they tell us that info, I’ll make further plans which I will discuss in the next progress update.

Actual game progress

I got some progress done! Due to everything going on, wasn’t as much as I hoped in some segments, however, organizing my pc was a big success and I am already seeing the benefits. I used both my vacation and almost a week of the last 2 weeks to go through everything and delete lots of unnecessary things, but through that, I got lots of inspirations and found new maps/ideas to use for future. Hence the big progress in world setup. Many outfits for the main cast is already selected, and a lot of time has been used to improve characters even more.

As you can see, Eiko has new hair! This was already showcased in the last months monthly render. Here and there, some characters will change hair, be it girls for special occasion or just changing their usual style to something else. Considering girls do change irl occasionally, I see no problems there. It won't be too often though, so no worries there. Back to Eiko tho. Her hair was broken anyway (shadows/lights bouncing incorrectly and making a buggy mess), so I definitely needed to change her. Besides Eiko, few more had some changes, and I’ll reveal them a bit later. I hope people will love what I did.
There was also a huge amount of fixes of things I didn’t know how to fix before, for example fixing bald spots on hairs, fixed few chars where hair was almost floating on top of the head, now making it much more “connected”. I’ll give plenty of insights in those things later on, this post is already long enough.

Dialogue:

Decent progress here. Area I expected more, but so far, 600 lines of dialogue done (out of roughly ~ 4 000- 5 000 planned). As I mentioned on Discord, what I can reveal is Eiko finally getting some screentime (also why I picked her for poster girl for report). There will also be some further character developments and personalization, as people seem to enjoy what I’ve done so far.

That’s it for now! Some might have spotted the new “Extras” shown in progress report. That’s for some secret stuff I plan to do, but if the time consumption is too great or I am just overwhelmed by uni, I’ll skip them as they are not crucial for Episode 4.

And an absolute huge thank you to every Patron who is sticking out with me through these troublesome times. It means the world to me, as having you guys and girls support literally makes it possible to continue making the game. Although update is gonna be slow, I hope it will be worth your time.

Stay safe, and see ya in the next one,
Kat <3