Wasn't too happy with that last render try so will park it for now.
Now then....
ON DATES....
So Four is finished as we know. Almost hit the end of August but the water stuff slowed me down a bit. But then came the remaster...
Now originally I was just going to do some of the Vanny interiors. the MC's room and the hallways which would have been around half of One, about a third of Two, a quarter of Three and, say, a tenth of Four. A lot of renders for sure but mostly fairly simple and not too demanding which meant I could do the end of September.
But, as a few of you suspected, once I started.....along came mission creep.
For example the landing scene in One I wasn't going to touch but you've seen the remaster of that yesterday. How can I possibly settle for what's currently there when I can make it look like that? Would you?
Same goes for the movement system, the character idents when speaking, Vanguard on approach, Sarah's room etc etc. It's the difference between night and day. So now I'm remastering approx all of One, most of Two, about half of Three and I'm having to redo a good third of Four (Sarah's, the Mc's bedroom plus hallways in case you were wondering). I'm too scared to count them all but well over 1,200 renders is my guess.
It's a lot of very unfun work. Remember I'm a writer not an artist so the thought of having to do that many renders, especially old ones, isn't a fun activity for me. But it simply has to be done as part of the launch of Four.
So how long and where does that leave us?
As to how long, I honestly don't know. On the upside a lot of the earlier renders were very simple in construct and so remastering them isn't taking that much render time. Certainly much less than when they were originally done with some taking around 15 minutes as opposed to the original hour. But certainly not September at any rate. Not now the workload has increased.
I was tempted to release Four to patrons regardless - but I have a pirate as a patron. I know, I know, I hang around with pirates all day so what's my beef....but bear with me.
The whole point of the remaster is when Four hits and the interest rises due to super-smut, new players see it in the new perfect glory and go wow - not meh. Of course existing players get the knock on effect of all the interiors, movement, char icons etc now looking much better too.
But there is little point in me doing all of this remastering in support of Four if a murkier version of Four will get released within the hour. It will be the murky version with all the unremastered work that does the rounds and so all this effort will have been pointless. And yes, it will happen. Three was released with a game breaking bug and, although I let everyone know within the hour and had it fixed pdq, some little scroat despite knowing this still decided to pirate and throw out the bugged version rather than waiting half a day and pirating the working version. So, if I release Four in it's current state that's the one everyone will see.
I don't want that to happen and so can't, and indeed won't, do that - so for once on here, piracy actually isn't your friend...
So what am I going to do?
I haven't entirely decided. I obvs need to make a call and let Patrons know asap for sure but I have a little while yet - but sooner rather than better for a host of reasons not least of all the value for money angle for them.
My current thoughts are very much to freeze the patron page, crack on with the work and unfreeze it when it's done. No one can deny I'm not working on the game of course (indeed arguably harder than ever before) but given that a lot of what I'm doing is in respect to older content, it's debatable how much benefit patrons get from this.
I'm also minded to release "Bored Pilot" to all current patrons this month as a separate download just so they'll have got something for the money this month. Of course they'll have to be a new BP for Four (oh the shame!) and McGruders one will also hit the PDA at the same time so the collection remains complete in game of course.
Anyhoo, I'll just leave this here for now. I welcome your thoughts as always before I make up my mind.
