Still Writing (and Sami)

Greetings! I'm not dead (yay!) but the release still isn't done (boo!) Here's a picture! (Yay!)

What's going on with the release? I'm still working on Ana's date quest. It's shaping up to be absurdly long... and I'm not sure how I feel about that, honestly. I suspect I'll end up heavily editing it when it's done, but even with heavy editing it'll still be absurdly long. Difficult as it may be to believe, I actually hate subjecting players to extremely long cutscenes, unless they've explicitly opted in to the "grab a drink and some popcorn" experience. There's definitely choices in here, but probably not enough to make it feel like something other than a really long cutscene. So, once the writing is complete, I'm probably going to make it so you have to explictly choose to talk about each of the major conversation topics. If you want to hear everything it'll still be really long, but this will at least provide a much shorter path through the date for those who don't care as much. (And actually - if you're an uber-completionist - to hear everything you'll have to play through at least 3 times to account for the different choices. Maybe more?)

The writing for this is taking quite a while, and I've put some thought into why that is. The first, obviously, is that it's long and there's quite a bit of actual writing involved. But there are a couple of other things. I view this scene as important, so I feel some pressure to get it right. And because I want to get it right, I've planned out roughly how it should go. I write much faster when I just start writing and end up wherever it takes me. But when there's an endpoint in mind, what happens is that I'll write for a while, realize the last thousand words or so take me pretty far from where I wanted to be, then have to chuck all that stuff and start again. (I've already done this a few times with this scene.) I did this with the Maia scene, too; I think it turned out pretty well, and I suspect this scene will be the same. But writing this way can be a bit tedious - I'm looking forward to getting back to writing less "important" stuff!

On to the picture! As I've mentioned before, I'm learning Maya. (That's not what was used to make this picture.) Learning how to do stuff in a 3D package is great, and I think I'll be able to make some really good stuff when I'm done - which is the whole reason for learning it. But I haven't really been practicing the artistic side of 3D lately - composition, lighting, visual storytelling, etc - so I decided to get some practice in on that with everyone's (or at least my) favorite succubus. I actually really like the image! Once everything was done I realized I meant to make Ana's hair band gold, but I suppose that's a minor gripe. My images can tend toward "super bright and saturated" but I've been trying to experiment with "bright and dark (and super saturated.)"

I also wanted to have an image to post after not posting for a while... anyway, I hope you like it, too! I don't have an ETA on the release, but I am working on it and steadily making progress. And anyone who's been a supporter of the appropriate tier for any of the last several months will get it, even if they're no longer a supporter. I'm going get back to writing - thank you for your patience and support!