As time passes, expectations are rising, and really, I get that some people are getting fed up or losing trust. So I'm reposting this patreon/subscribestar post from today here, hopefully that helps to take aways some doubts you're having (I admit in writing it, it took away some of mine as well).
-----
State of chapter 5
Well, even though I've been able to update the progress bar every Wednesday over the past period, it's been a little while since the last write up, so let's do some numbers again.
Keep in mind that the number below are rough, and the conclusions you can make from them come with a wide margin of error.
Let's do the images.
Right now there's 6101 individual .png image files in LomL, and 3800 .webp files. Since I've last converted .png files into .webp releasing chapter 4, that means 2301 images added.
Note: images don't translate one-on-one into renders, as I cut up renders into bits in order to do the little animation stuff. I'm taking a wild and baseless guess the ratio is about 1.5 images for every 1 render.
So what conclusion can we draw from this? Well, at this moment, chapter 5 has 2.4x the average for the previous chapter in images added, and we're not even there yet.
Yay, that means it's 2.4 times better, because everyone knows the quality of a VN is measured by the number of images! Nah, I'm just kidding, it's not. But it's a nice indication of effort; creating up the visuals are the greatest time sink by far for me.
Mind you, that's creating the visual scenes that take up my time, not rendering: rendering time is irrelevant as that happens while I'm working editing, writing and coding.
So that means it's already 2.4 times as long as the previous chapter?
Ah... no. This chapter requires me to create almost all visuals from scratch as we're not spending much time (if any) at our usual haunts. I'm guessing it'll be similar in size to the last installment, but I've not measured it in any way.
Let's do development time!
Let's compare that to development times: the final version of the last chapter came out May 20th, so let's peg it at 5.5 months now? The chapter before that came out just before Christmas, so lets say 5 months development time for chapter 3 to completion?
So from a graphics/images point of view, chapter 5 development isn't lagging/slowing down in comparison to the previous chapters, it's picking up.
But are we there yet?
Now, let's look at overall progression. From the progress bar, we've got 41 portraits filled in, 5 partials, and 6 remaining. Let's count the partials as 50%: that leaves 41+2.5 finished, 6+2.5 remaining, so that's 83% of the way there (rounding down).
That's about as far as I'm willing to go at this point though. Given the numbers above, and the fact that history shows an additional two weeks or so of proofing and QA, I'll let you draw your own conclusions; I'm not willing to commit to any dates until I'm sure this beast has thrown all it had at me.
Why this little breakdown?
Well, I'm not gonna lie. Being a lone dev on a huge project, it can be taxing, especially when people come round yelling at you, and I found myself at the brink of having a tiny emotional breakdown myself. I wanted to have a quick and dirty verification to check if I'm not lagging or faltering, and I'm happy I can conclude that if anything, I'm actually picking up speed.
As always, I'm super grateful for your love and support, and dedicated to get the next installment of LomL in your hands as fast as is humanly possible.
