Status update Episode 11 (Patreon)

I started the week by continuing to work on SFX and music. I'm almost done with the audio work for what's currently produced of the episode and I will leave the remaining work in this area for later.

After that, I worked more on Rooster, writing/coding clucks, and creating art and avatars for characters who needed them.

I'm about 80-90% done with the Clucks now. I posted one on Twitter earlier this week, and you can also view them from the Rooster channel on my Discord server as they are posted. You'll be seeing more Clucks soon, so stay tuned for those. I think I will add a couple more clucks to the episode before the end of this development cycle.

I've worked on phone chats and phone chat screens in the story, so there's some nice progress in this area, too, but more is needed.

I also made sure the phone worked as intended during story scenes. It's important to control when it's enabled/disabled and which apps are available. When done right, the player never notices this—it's a bit of thankless work.

I also added some new photos to the phone gallery so you can enjoy some new custom wallpapers.

Then, I finalized one of the bigger free-roam events by writing a handful of scenes and posing the static renders for them. I have one small free-roam left to create from scratch, and the biggest free-roam event of the episode still needs more work, but I also worked on this over the week.

I am now focusing on adding more content to the Sage branch and am in the middle of writing more of her exclusive scenes. That's one of the first things I'll focus on next week.

Here are some final thoughts to end this update.

Over the last couple of weeks, when I worked with audio, I played through the episode several times, fixed glaring issues, and restructured parts to improve the story flow. When I did this, I also made notes about what should be fixed and rewrote some dialogue here and there. I do much of this work when I polish the episode near the end of every development cycle. This is when I get a feeling of how long the episode is and how it plays.

Right now, this episode feels huge to work with. The heavy branching in the story and the gaps that need more scenes make it feel like there is less content at times, but overall, it still feels huge.

I work meticulously at a rather slow pace, inspecting all renders, reading the dialogue aloud, etc. I can't even work through one branch of the episode like this in under one day; I need two days to get from the start to the end. It's hard to translate this into gameplay time for a standard player, but it feels very long for me, and that's a benchmark I'm happy with.

Several times, I've thought this content could have been divided across two episodes, but I don't see how I could have spliced it that way because of the branching and the story being told. And even with all that's done so far, I could have added much more for some characters. But I have clearly defined limits of what's left to do with the story content for episode 11. It's been a struggle to shine the spotlight on everyone fairly this episode, but I'm so excited about the story I'm about to tell you with this one.

Have a nice weekend

Dr PinkCake