so why when i decided to fight Tommy I got a DIK affinity when i made 6 Dik Choices (including to fight Tommy) and 4 chick choices? is it because I made like 4 DIK choices in a row?
DIK or CHICK Affinity (not Status) is temporarily set when you have made 2 or more choices of one type than the other; a difference of 1 or less results in Neutral Affinity. Making 6 DIK and 4 CHICK choices would switch your Affinity to DIK, which seems to be what you're describing. If your next choice was CHICK (giving you 6 DIK and 5 CHICK), the difference would be only 1 and your Affinity would change to Neutral. Make another 3 CHICK choices and your Affinity would become CHICK.
Or at least it would temporarily. There's also
permanent Affinities which work differently. You gain permanent DIK or CHICK Affinity if you remove all the boxes on the other side of the meter. That requires a total of 11 choices of one type - e.g. you'd gain permanent DIK Affinity if you made 11 DIK choices, regardless of how many CHICK choices you made (and vice versa). The catch is that there are only 15 Major Decisions in the game, so it's impossible to make 11 choices of one type as soon as you've made 5 choices of each type. In that case your Affinity will be permanently set to Neutral... but only once you've made the 15 choice (deciding whether to cheat on the mid-terms in Episode 8).
So in your example fighting Tommy changes your Affinity to DIK because you only had 4 CHICK choices, a difference of 2. If you make another 5 DIK choices you'd gain permanent DIK Affinity on the 15th Major Decision. But if you make a single additional CHICK choice you will be committed to permanent Neutral Affinity near the end of Episode 8 (your temporary Affinity at any given time before that would depend on the ratio of choices at that time).
Hopefully that helps; I know it's a bit of a headache to keep straight.
Quick question: I used to jump on once a week or so and search for anything posted by N7 to get the latest updates, but they haven't posted in a while and I know there have been other updates and previews. Is there a key forum figure that I should be looking up instead these days? Thanks brothers.
There's been too much variability lately to make a simple rule of thumb; better just to go through the posts on Friday until you find the update. You can try searching my posts on Fridays since I will post some charts and include a link to the update post, but I only do that if there's something to chart and DPC frequently avoids numbers in his updates.
Yes he lost some time with those things and Covid. This episode is likely to take him 6 to 12 weeks longers that episode 8. Which was already 7 weeks longer than episode 7 and 6 weeks longer than episode 6. I'm not giving to much extra time allowance to mini games and stuff since he has added new content like this fairly regularly over the years.
That said, you're right animations are a tricky thing to judge, but 'still renders' are a good indication. The last confirmed update was for week 27 with 3569 completed. The same week for epsiode 8 he had 4130 and episode 7 had released with 3723 4 weeks earlier.
As i've talked about in the past his production averages are way down. 16 fewer stills a week and 5.8 fewer animtions. Over 27 weeks of production (last confrimed numbers) he is 432 'stills' down on episode 8 and 157 animations. Yes animations are hard to judge, but even if some are much longer than normal i still think this is a bit behind.
I agree that DPC's development
seems slower, but I don't think Statics are a reliable way to verify that because we know DPC can render them nearly as fast as he can pose them. That makes their render rate too variable to use as a proper metric; all it tells us is that DPC is spending his time on something other than posing statics. We don't know if he's posing inordinately complicated/lengthy animations, coding new features/mini-games, planning his next marketing release, or what have you. It's basically the same problem we have using animations as a consistent metric, just one step removed.
So to summarize, the longer-than-expected development time can be attributed to:
- the music needing to be removed from the game
- covid
- itch.io thing
- the animations/renders taking longer to render which is still being debated about whether that made a difference (personally, I think it's up in the air since we haven't really seen improved numbers since the "longest animation yet")
I'm just trying to get the facts straight because I just have a feeling that episodes being released once a year isn't going to be the future trend and think it had more to do with unexpected circumstances.
There's one last thing but I can't remember it too well and I'm not sure if it's just something he always did during development or whether it affected things at all. Something about getting Steam and other platforms ready for Season 3 which I always thought he did in post-production after it'd been released on Patreon. Not releasing the GAME but taking care of whatever needs to be done so it CAN be released on Steam, etc. as well. I thought he would usually do both of those things (getting things ready for Steam, etc and then releasing the game on those platforms) after the release on Patreon.
I know I'm not making much sense. I'm just not familiar with how that goes and can only vaguely remember what one of his weekly updates said about it a couple of months ago.
Eh, I think SomboSteel had the right idea. Until DPC demonstrates he's willing to cut ideas to keep the updates a manageable size, the best prediction is to take the time for the last update and add 15-30% to it (not counting the Interlude). Every now and then you might be pleasantly surprised, the rest of the time you'll be in the ballpark.
