Bi-weekly status #41 (20240202)

This will be a relatively short status. The past fortnight was incredibly productive. We finished scenes 10 and 11, meaning there are only two left for chapter 8. Both of these scenes are longer than usual, and feature a number of animations which take time to set up and (a long time to) render, so we still can't pinpoint an end date yet. Stay tuned

By now, hopefully our Super and Credited Supporters will have seen our 4K renders for February. They feature Alex and Sammy this time around. "Lewd makes the art grow fonder," as they say. Who "they" are, we have no idea. Still, it's the best we could come up with on such little sleep.

We've finished converting the sources to Ren'Py 8.2 which was just released this past weekend. Another thing we've added since version 0.7.1 is the ability to change the fonts used by the VN. This includes the game's interface. You'll now have the option to use Bree (the default), or one of the following: NotoSans, NotoSerif, or OpenSans. Snax picked the original Bree font and wasn't so enthusiastic about the change, but we think you'll find it, umm, a refreshing change.

Welcome to our new supporters! We really appreciate it—you're the reason we keep doing this. If you haven't already, please join us on our Discord server and say hi!

Friends, Romans, Countrypersons! Lend me thine eyes for these two splendid results of our recent travails!

Bi-weekly status #40 (20240119)

This has been an eventful fortnight. Just as we were finishing up scene 8, Snax decided to merge it into scene 6 to improve the flow of the story. This involved some hefty story rewrites, and a bunch of replacement renders owing to a change in location. (And, 11 animations...)

We managed to nail down the new Frankenstein scene 6/8 and are now most of the way through scene 9.

While Snax was busy working on story rewrites and new renders, we managed to finish coding on a couple more of the scenes that are left. That's why the "Coding" gauge seems out of whack. Don't worry, though, we'll get back to our "just-in-time" coding in the near future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

State of the Project

As of this week, we've completed over 8,000 renders total over the project, for both images and animations. That's 8,000 renders that actually made it into the story, and doesn't include the many (way too many) aborted renders and animations that were created as part of the quality control and editing processes. Some of these renders take 15 minutes; some approach 2 hours...

Rounding out the audit of the project so far, we've created around 52,000 words of dialogue and almost 50,000 lines of source code, spread over 242 files. That's a far cry from Confusion's humble single-file HTML Twine beginnings...

News

We conducted an interesting poll on our Discord server this week. The question had to do with how players "handled" Zoey in Chapter 7. (Spoilers ahead.) Interestingly enough, one of the options that was added to the story in response to a bunch of messages we've received, wasn't chosen by a single player in the poll (i.e. ending things with Zoey). The other two options came out about how we expected: 38% chose counseling/redemption for Zoey, and 62% chose the, um, less PG-13 route.

A word about future releases: after getting some input from some fellow creators, we're going to extend the time that VIP and Patron+ supporters get for exclusive access to the story, starting with chapter 8. Credited Supporters will have 3-week exclusivity, Super Supporters will have 2-weeks, and standard Supporters 1-week before the general release. We're doing this to better recognize our patrons' levels of commitment to the project. We hope you'll be supportive of why we're doing this.

And now for something completely different ...

Welcome to our new supporters! We really appreciate it—you're the reason we keep doing this. If you haven't already, please join us on our Discord server and say hi!

Fair patrons, cast your eyes upon these two visual treasures, born of our recent efforts!