Working on renders, while finishing up parts of the script, has really made me appreciate how much work I was putting into a bunch of scenes that were hypothetically mutually exclusive (I know one of you deviants would just make a mod).  This kind of got me re-evaluating why I was making the scenes mutually exclusive.  There is a plot point I want to hit in the next release.  It's kind of the last big thing that needs to happen to fully frame some of the central points of the story.  I need to get that out of the way so I can brush off negative criticism about the story as a sign of poor reading comprehension as opposed to some fault in my writing.  I am perfect and so is my game.  

The original thought was that this update would cover 'first thing I'ma do when I get outta here', and this plot point would hit right after whatever that 'first thing' was.  Turns out, I'm the writer, I can push the plot point back a little if I want to.

So, what I'm thinking now is that the player will get the full buffet of options, and the plot point will hit once they're done with everything they want to do.  I was worried about throwing off the pacing, but this part of the game isn't supposed to move as fast as the beginning, so I think it'll be fine.  Probably.  I hope.

I do think there should be some extra significance to the player's 'first thing', and I'll need to make some tweaks to some scenes to capture who the player has already seen/fucked/thrown off a roof, but I'm not talking about any big rewrites or scrapped work here.  

I've got a lot of Ness's scene built and a decent chunk of it rendered.  Counting just what I've got rendered for her so far, there are already a few hundred renders.  Her scene is going to end up with more renders than most because I'm silly and decided to have different outfits for her depending on some earlier choices, but generalizing a bit, we're conservatively looking at a few hundred renders for most characters' scene.  That's Ness, Stella, Izzi, Xiang, and also maybe some other people that I either haven't fully committed to building a scene for yet or I'm keeping secret because I'm a dick.  Add in the 'mandatory' scenes bookending the update, and that's a lot of renders.  And words.  Way too many words.

I don't want to break the update up into separate releases since most of it will be optional, if some player isn't interested in seeing or talking to any of the characters I build scenes for, then they won't really have anything to do until I release the plot point I mentioned.  Depending on how long I spend working on this update, I might do a partial release to paid subscribers.  I don't want people sitting around waiting too long, especially if they're generous enough to support me.  We'll burn that bridge when we get there.

TLDR - Update's going to be big.  You'll get to play through the scenes you want to instead of being forced to choose just one.

I needed a break from building Ness's scene, so I've started work on another one.  She's long overdue for some screen time, so her content has been pretty fun to write.

I'm going to try a little harder to keep everyone up to date on my progress from here on out.  I haven't always been good about that, and the next update is looking like it is going to be larger than my average, so it feels a little more important to keep everyone in the loop.  Don't want you guys to think I'm asleep at the wheel.

I probably already mentioned it somewhere you can see, but I spent a little more time 'finalizing' the script before getting in and working on the renders this time around.   The rough draft was huge, and to be honest, it's still huge.  I want to cover *most* of the 'first thing I'm going to do when I get outta here' stuff, which means there's going to be some branching and alternate versions of some scenes.

I've been trying to cut it down to reasonable/manageable levels, but there's a plot point I want to hit, and I think it works best after most of the scenes I've scripted out for the next release.  All of you probably have a different idea of what you would want the MC to do first now that he's free (throw Izzi off a roof, confide with Xiang, blow Sara's back out), so that is a lot of ground to cover.

I'm kind of happy with the script right now, so I'm working my way through the scenes in Daz.  I kind of started out of order with the renders because I wanted to make sure I had the assets to pull off part of a scene before getting too far into this dev cycle.  So, here's Ness sitting in a car and Sara in a 100% natural sleeping position.

Next update is probably going to be kind of big.

Which means it's probably going to take a little extra time.

Apologies to everyone who thinks that's bad news and you're welcome to everyone who thinks it's good news.

Just realized I forgot to mention this here publicly - 

0.5.5 was released on the 14th, it will go public on the 28th.

Counting from 0.4 - there are 1397 new renders.

I added a Replay Gallery.  It's still a bit of a WIP, but I'm pretty sure it works.

Hanna and Candi's scenes got swapped out for Nat and Sara's.  Stella, Ness, and Mol all get their sim scenes.