Thank you for your kind words!
Let me give you some insight so that anyone interested can understand what's going on behind the scenes. As I've mentioned in previous posts, me and
Suzinak are trying constantly to find ways to improve our creative output.
In the past few months we've tried a mix of ways to work. In some cases we created the renders first and the story was written around the renders (eg. CH1 and CH2 was done completely like that). In some other cases we created the detailed storyline first, and the renders were created afterwards to match that (eg. most scenes of CH3, and all scenes of CH4 are being worked like that).
In the "renders first" approach, we had creative freedom for the rendering process, but it limited the story telling. Each time a render was added or came out different, then we had to rework the direction of the story. And you can imagine with a complex storyline, this is more difficult that writing a few dialogs. Several "subtle" things needed to be conveyed to the player in another way.
In the "story first" approach, the rendering process was more difficult because we had to replicate every detail of the storyline. Also some scenes were either difficult to render in terms of positioning, or the scene was creating collisions between the characters and/or objects, or the lighting of the scene needed tuning to bring up the quality of the scene. This brought out a lot of new challenges.
We can understand that people are anxious to see the next chapter and we're working hard on it. I wanted to share also that from CH5, we're going to combine both approaches. We're going to develop the story and renders in parallel, giving priority to the rendering process since re-writing a scene is faster than re-rendering a whole scene. But that will take effect from CH5 onwards.
For now, we know that CH4 is ambitious in terms of scenes and complexity, so the rendering has a lot more effort. We understand that the timelines between releases is not what we want to continue with. We want to target more frequent releases, but we had already created CH4 (as ambitious as it is) and we want to deliver our complete vision. We do not want to compromise and either release with a sup-par quality, nor we want to cut scenes or parts of it to make the release sooner.
We know it's worth it and we're working hard so that you can experience it soon
TL;DR
The CH4 update is big and it takes time.
We're improving our process to make future releases more frequent.
