I really fucking hate this kind of mental gymnastics. It would be fine if hes actually geared up to make only 2 more releases of 1,5 episodes of content each to complete season 3. But he wont.
Adding that .5 at the end is so bloody self-servingly convenient and deceitful instead of truthful that he have been dragging his ass tremendously with this release. There will be no bloody stand alone requiried "half episode" when this season 3 is complete on steam! So in conclusion it IS 25% complete regardless of what the [explative] says. The Interlude was and still is pure happenstance, it became a stand alone release for technical reasons (new save system, game size etc).
To be fair to DPC, if you go by the size of the episodes, and if we assume the next 3 episodes don't get dramatically larger (considering ep 9 is actually about 300MB less than episode 8), the overall size for season 3, including the Interlude is about 21MB. And the Interlude and episode 9 come to about 7.3 MB. So, there's your 33%.
There's no smoke and mirrors, no bullshit. Whether people wanted, or enjoyed the Interlude, ultimately it just plays out as an interactive prologue to the new season, just like previous episodes have had short non-interactive prologues.
I'm not gonna begrudge DPC the milestone.
Maybe, but tbh I don't really trust DPC's word. He's not as overexaggerating (or straight up lying) as other devs on this website, but he does overpromise sometimes, like I believe he said episode 8 was supposed to be a shorter episode and then it was the longest by a long shot. There are obviously reasons for why it was longer than other episodes, but I just don't think DPC (like pretty much every dev in the world) has an accurate measure of how long things will take.
If we were to go by DPC's promises, like you said he would have only 22.3% of the content in the season that he needs to do next episode. That would make the next episode 2/3 the size of this one, making development time estimated around 6 months. But DPC also said that custom renders, which he is cutting out, takes 10% of the time, so now it's closer to 5 months if DPC is accurate with his estimates. I just don't see it. Thats a HUGE cut in development time, one that we've never seen before in his development of all 9 episodes, so I just can't get my hopes up for it. The only times we've seen DPC go down in development time, it was by a few days, maybe 2 weeks. And then those were immediately followed by almost month-long jumps in dev time.
Read my comment above, I think it's clear he's including the Interlude as part as Season 3 and he's basing it on file size. The interlude will always be packaged in the Season 3 game, so it's fair enough regardless of whether people like it.
I think the 33% comment was just a fun observation from DPC, not sure why people are getting riled up by it.
And regarding delivery times, I've said before, some people can't even get their dinner cooked on schedule, so accurately predicting an evolving product that will take more than 6 months to produce is not easy.
Technically the episode is smaller (in size) than episode 8, it just took longer to get out seemingly because of all the extra long animations. Animations take a ridiculously long time for a very small pay-off. Depending on hardware etc, it can take hours just to deliver 1 second of animation (depending on frames per second), so a minute long animation can take more than a week!
I just hope DPC has learnt something about the bottleneck of animations, and it doesn't keep holding everything up.
Since the whole interlude is from Zoey's perspective, I wouldn't have minded some more romantic paths for her. Maybe Bret? Idk, some might consider it approaching NTR once you're back in character (even though you're not dating Zoey). But personally I played the interlude so long after finishing Season 2 that it was basically a new game altogether. Can't wait for S3!!!
Zoey's struggling as it is to gain popularity (due to her being held personally responsible for the delay of episode 9), so her fucking other people would have been character suicide among a lot of the people on this site.
the height ratios between the various characters are quite random, when they interact with MC they are shorter than him but in the same order of size, then they meet each other and you find out that they are David and Goliath
Even the bike ride with Josy in the first episode, she's all over the place:
What if you could control Zoey to fuck girls MC rejected? Would be fun
I don't know why, but this made me think of a mini game, where a jealous Zoey has to run around trying to sabotage all of the mc's relationships.
"Trivial" That pretty much sums up the interlude in one word.
And pretty much all of the mc's problems as well. The triviality of BaDIK may very well be one of its endearing qualities, even if people don't realise it.
I noticed that AGNES (the old lady the MC takes care in the elderly home) mentions she has a greedy son who dropped her there, and she is clinging to life so he can't get the inheritance.
I think her full name will be found to be Agnes Burke, and in the future episodes a chick MC bonds with her and she places him in her will (which could be disputed due to dementia), which would be a fuck you to Burke.
That's actually one conspiracy theory that sounds pretty good (I imagine Dalli proposed it years ago though).
It's the quickest way to go for those who don't like DnG.
