The one post i spotted immediately in my first rapid glance at the thread, an important message from the Dev!
Thank you for letting us know about your progression to make the release of CH4 a complete success.
Wasn't too happy with that last render try so will park it for now.
Now then....
ON DATES....
So Four is finished as we know. Almost hit the end of August but the water stuff slowed me down a bit. But then came the remaster...
Now originally I was just going to do some of the Vanny interiors. the MC's room and the hallways which would have been around half of One, about a third of Two, a quarter of Three and, say, a tenth of Four. A lot of renders for sure but mostly fairly simple and not too demanding which meant I could do the end of September.
But, as a few of you suspected, once I started.....along came mission creep.
As i think now that i'm part of the "few", the happy few, i knew you were redoing almost... Everything!!!
For example the landing scene in One I wasn't going to touch but you've seen the remaster of that yesterday. How can I possibly settle for what's currently there when I can make it look like that? Would you?
Same goes for the movement system, the character idents when speaking, Vanguard on approach, Sarah's room etc etc. It's the difference between night and day. So now I'm remastering approx all of One, most of Two, about half of Three and I'm having to redo a good third of Four (Sarah's, the Mc's bedroom plus hallways in case you were wondering). I'm too scared to count them all but well over 1,200 renders is my guess.
It's a lot of very unfun work. Remember I'm a writer not an artist so the thought of having to do that many renders, especially old ones, isn't a fun activity for me. But it simply has to be done as part of the launch of Four.
"not an artist"??
The new landing scene, IMHO, is nothing more than an artistical touch to dynamize the scene with smoke and dust and the new view angle (from the ground) to enhance the effect! I don't even speak about the new sun angle, shadow etc...
"Not an artist"? let me... be respectful!
"having to do that many renders, especially old ones"
What worries me(and us,no?) the most is this part, to do repetitive tasks ad nauseam.
So how long and where does that leave us?
As to how long, I honestly don't know. On the upside a lot of the earlier renders were very simple in construct and so remastering them isn't taking that much render time. Certainly much less than when they were originally done with some taking around 15 minutes as opposed to the original hour. But certainly not September at any rate. Not now the workload has increased.
Hum, will the artistical touch strike again?
Time render estimation is futile... just express yourself, have a bit of fun and let the RH do the rest.
So what am I going to do?
I haven't entirely decided. I obvs need to make a call and let Patrons know asap for sure but I have a little while yet - but sooner rather than better for a host of reasons not least of all the value for money angle for them.
My current thoughts are very much to freeze the patron page, crack on with the work and unfreeze it when it's done. No one can deny I'm not working on the game of course (indeed arguably harder than ever before) but given that a lot of what I'm doing is in respect to older content, it's debatable how much benefit patrons get from this.
I'm also minded to release "Bored Pilot" to all current patrons this month as a separate download just so they'll have got something for the money this month. Of course they'll have to be a new BP for Four (oh the shame!) and McGruders one will also hit the PDA at the same time so the collection remains complete in game of course.
Anyhoo, I'll just leave this here for now. I welcome your thoughts as always before I make up my mind.
to be brief as i have to read the rest of the thread also(one day and night missed), my final thoughts:
DON'T freeze the patron page, let them choose individually... no pool required!
Brill idea to perhaps release the BP as a separate download(pdf file?)... McGruder, yeah!
A good way also to have more different chars in BP than the number of chaps would allowed.
One Adult Game to Rule them All.