Dont know how DPC planned the game... some assume he will do the whole college time, which would be 3 or 4 years. I dont think so, especially considering that so many characters would leave college after the first and second year for the MC... how would the game look than? Nono... not happening. And foir that we would need HUGE timejumps, not only for several weeks, no even for years. Nah.
Its more likely that we will only face the first year with the MC at college... how it will end? Dunno... iam pretty sure that the MC will not finish college anyways, for whatever reason. I think his first year at college will be his last too. There are a ton of possible scenarios why this could be the case though, not going into that now.
But overall, for the "timespan" of the game, i cant imagine that it will be longer than one year. There might be an epilogue with a look into the future after the first year for the MC at college, but nothing more.
For now... we have about 3 months done. The game started in summer, i think maybe august. there were some timejumps already. At the end of ep 8 it was mentioned we are at "fall", its getting cold... falling leaves and so on, Halloween is already in sight... for episode 9 we will get Halloween, so its a solid date we have than with october 31th. Its a pretty solid guess that the story started in august i think. So yeah, overall 3 months are gone with episode 9.
And i think there will be another timejump coming up. Maybe during episode 9, but more likely with episode 10... i have a feeling that we will not see christmas and winter episodes. I think winter and christmas will be somewhat dealt with in a "fast" way. A collage like we saw already... i cant imagine that DPC will put much effort into the holiday season. There is no college for several weeks... Most people will be on vacation, visiting families and such... i cant imagine a whole (or major part) episode with all the characters seperated for several weeks outside of college. Nah... there will be a timejump for that. With a summarizing collage with maybe one month again including a bit of christmas and new year and thats it... No i dont see a big "new year party" coming. As far as i know its not common during college, cause new year falls into the holidays too. So yeah... for this i see a timejump coming and with episode 10 or near the end of episode 10, we are already in january during the game. So... half done after episode 10 would be my guess for the overall timespan we will get during the game.
That considered, the game is on a good track i think regarding "time-pace"
For the development time... yeah iam somewhat concerned too. Like it was for this episode, the game will be done 2030 or something like that. I hope not....
I still believe DPC can speed up everything with new hardware and if he would be a little more disciplined regarding the amount of renders and animations he is doing.
He went overboard, especially with animations for this episode (the naimations alone are already taking 6 weeks while everything else is already done without them we would have gotten a release early november)... his goal after episode 8 was to make the episodes a little smaller than ep 8... i think he said something about 3500 renders, not more and such... yeah, well... we will get nearly 5000 now. And way more and longer animations too.
Will it be worth it? We will see... i think the overall quality would not decrease if the episodes will only have 3500 and maybe 180 animations in future episodes.
If he could be that disciplined, would upgrade his hardware too, it would be a easy task to get on a 6 months schedule for each episode. That would be totally fine. But can he discipline himself not going overboard again? Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell... *shrug*
