It's been a while since I last updated the game, so I guess I should let people in here know what's going on. As a reminder, I do weekly progress reports for my patrons and subscribers at all levels of support, so if you ever want the freshest, juiciest news about my games, that's where you'll find it.
The contents of version 0.38 are massive from a development standpoint, even if they might cover only a small part of the game itself. As explained before, this update will be focusing entirely on finishing all the night scenes, including getting Perversity to 6 and implementing the Deep Sleep spell. In terms of the amount of work required to finish it, this is probably the biggest update I've ever made. The endgame updates were also large but in a different way. Those mostly were about me trying to set up an incredibly complex series of story beats and puzzles, which is not something I'm concerned with this time around. Instead, the biggest challenge is simply getting all the renders done.
Simply put, every single image in the night scenes (4 in all: Evelyn, Primrose, Callie, and Samarra/Nell) has to be remade for this update. This is because of changes to the render engine in Daz Studio, resulting in any new renders looking very different from the ones I made before even if I use the same files. It is also because I want to lift all the animations to the level you see elsewhere in the game, and there are a LOT of animation loops in these scenes. At the time of writing, I have built and rendered 74 (yes, you read that right) new animation loops for version 0.38, and I'm still not done. The 0.38 folder currently contains 1506 images. These numbers are enormous compared to anything else I've done in this game before.
As a consequence of all this, 0.38 is taking a lot longer than most updates. I'm hoping to finish it before the end of November, but I honestly don't think the chances of that happening are very high. It's definitely possible and I'm not giving up on it, but I have to be realistic. All my work so far has been focused on the image rendering, but I have barely even started on writing and coding. Even if I do miss November, however, I do not foresee any situation in which the update would be out any later than December.
So, if you feel like things have been quiet lately, this is why. 0.38 is an unusually chunky update that I've been putting off for ages because I knew it would be chunky. It has to be done, though, and I'm almost at the finish line.