Maybe DPC learned a bit from episode 9 development? Already making animations, and 37 are done already... Well we can assume, they will be animations again which are kinda pointless, some like them, i dont think they add that much to the game. But if he can do them without delaying the overall development that much, its fine... But that didnt worked out for the last release. In fact those animations delayed the whole episode about two months. Getting animations practically in the first week of development done is a good way to start the process. In the last development schedule DPC has added the the animations to the queue a lot later. I knew he would make many animations again, he simply loves to do them... even if it means a meaningless character out of a movie-scene is walking. But if they are done without getting in the way, its ok... starting this early with them is a very good approach i think. Could make the overall development of the episode much faster and smoother. Last time it was only waiting time left the last two months for unnecessary animations. He has do avoid that.
More Minigames... no surprise here, he loves to make them, we all know that. The partyplanning minigame wasnt well received though (but again, DPC ignores many critics, he does that all the time... well success gives him the right to do so i think... he doesnt need to care). I think its was a nice idea, but not well made... especially the totally random things about this minigame were annoying... there was a RNG for the mansion game too, but not that annoying. It didnt matter at all for the mansion game cause you can always win it very easily, but for the party planer... even if you make it PERFECT you cant always get a A or S-rank.. its only possible in a few starting formations... and you cant influence them. That was annoying. But... well... didnt matter in the end.
And yeah he wants to make it a smaller episode... well... heard that before... he wanted to make them smaller since episode 6. And they were getting bigger and bigger... though, in playtime and for the overall lenghts of scenes, episode 9 was shorter. Cause it was a big free roam with many little variables it turned out to need more renders, but the numbers didnt boost the playtime that much cause the scenes werent THAT different cause they were always playing in the same room, just the lines and characters were different. Playing episode 7 or 8 for example was overall way more differently for each path, with a whole other set on locations an persons in it... That is a whole other feeling to play. And took me longer to play than episode 9, where it didnt matter on what path you are, the locations were always the exact same. Didnt liked that about the episode. Render-count doesnt mean more playtime, episode 9 showed that to me. The comparsion to Acting Lesson is interesting. Acting Lesson doesnt have 5000 renders as a complete game, it has about 4800 renders (and way less animations)... but playing the game does take WAY LONGER than playing being a dik epsiode 9. DPC changed a lot impressions while the talking was done this time... i dont think that you need every second line a new render too. This does boost the render count immense, but dont add anything to the playtime...
well to be honest... the render count itself didnt take that long to develop. The renders were pretty much done in september already. which would be a 6 months release... would be fine. There were other reason why it took so long, and DPC needs to learn from that.
As i said at the beginning, this status report shows to me a little that he might learned something, especially on approaching the animations... though he will obviously not cut them shorter, but is doing them way earlier in the process. This could work out too.
