Dev Update #50
Just now
Hi everyone, work is going well but I'm extremely busy with tonnes to do so I'll try to keep this brief.
E4 is progressing well but I need to tell you that I'm still a long way from completion and this will be the slowest of the 3 updates I'm aiming to release this year. E4 is going to be quite a big step in a number of ways which are causing development to take longer than E3. You might assume that I'm talking about branching choices and pathing here but that's actually not the case at all. E4 is going to be quite a big chapter in terms of story progression especially and this means you'll meet a lot of new characters who are going to be quite important to things going forward.
There are a lot of things I'm having to create for E4 for the first time which are slowing me down now but won't slow down future episodes. I don't want to give any spoilers but I'm sure a lot of you will guess that the one faction of students who have been referenced a lot but are currently unseen will sooner or later make an appearance. So there's been a lot of time spent here on character design, outfits, and story cohesion. On top of these characters I also of course spent some time a couple of weeks ago future proofing all the main 18 girls so that I wouldn't need to change them again in future. I'm really pleased with how all characters are looking and I'll probably show you E4 Naomi soon - she's the only one who's had non-minor changes.
But all this combined with some of the extra things I'm trying to do with renders and animations to improve overall quality has meant that I am behind where I want to be at this stage. I wanted to use this dev update to manage expectations of where I am. I'm still working on the animations and will hopefully start powering through the still renders in a couple of weeks. This is going to be the most important update so far and so there are just a lot of things I need to work on.
But I don't want you to think updates are going to get slower every episode - this isn't really the case it's just that E4 involves a lot of 
first time content (e.g. meeting some characters for the first time, gameplay features for the first time etc.) Weirdly E4 actually has a lot in common with E1.
So it's kinda strange - I can't give you an estimate for E4 but I can give you an estimate for E6 (still end of this year, in line with my target of 3 eps in 2025). I'm working hard to develop E4,5 & 6 to as high a quality as possible rather than just delivering E4 as fast as possible. I hope this makes sense.
Thank you for your continued support and all the Elmwood birthday wishes