- Jan 21, 2020
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Hi All, Just wanted to share a status update on episode 20. Beach house / morning after: Artwork & script complete (just needs some testing) Jenna / Jolina scenes: Script 70% complete, artwork complete (with the exceptions of a few anims) Dogboy / Roger / Natasha scenes: 100% complete (artwork, anims and script) and it's been fully tested. Elaine scene - just getting started. So overall, I would say we are approx. 65% done. BUT we expect progress over the next couple of weeks to speed up so still very much on course for a March release. Over the past two months, we were practically a man down from our 3 man-team (due to some real life stuff) AND we've been putting a LOT of work into expanding the team and have auditioned over 40 people. After this exhaustive process, we are delighted to welcome a new artist to the team: Maple. Maple brings a lot of image and animation experience to the team (plus some game design / coding experience) so we are delighted to have them. And I hope to introduce a new writer very soon too (he has been identified, just waiting to finalize a few things before announcing). So the team of 3 is hopefully expanding to a team of 5. This will really help us lessen the blow of any one person being unable to work on the game due to real life stuff (1 in 5 impact, rather than 1 in 3) or if the unthinkable happens and we lose one of the team, it means we won't grind to a halt. But thankfully no plans for anyone to leave (Ace and Cell are still securely locked up in my basement). This expansion of the team should also help us get our production time down to 2 months instead of the current cycle of 3 months. On that note, it is just not possible to get our cycle down to 1 month due to the amount of dialog, choices, branches, variables and the amount of art we squeeze into every episode. The rendering (PC/GPU) time alone for episode 19 was over 600 hours. If we release every month, we just wouldn't have a decent playable episode, so our target for the rest of 2021 is two months. I'm not guaranteeing we can/will hit this but it is what we are aiming for. We have also expanded our proof-reader / branch testing / QC team and are going to release each scene to them as soon as we finish the individual scene. This should cut down on the amount of testing time needed before release once the episode is complete. One other point to note is that no matter how much we expand the team, there will always be somewhat of a bottleneck because I don't like to release any piece of script or art without me personally analyzing, scrutinizing, tweaking (and generally pissing of the other artist / writer by constantly asking for edits / re-dos). It would probably make things go quicker if I just concentrated on the art/writing for my specific scenes but on the other hand, I also feel we could end up diverging too much from scene to scene if we don't have a common thread tying everything together. So in summary my control-freak nature will always add some time to the development regardless of team size. Also (for anyone interested) - Just to give you some insight into WTHI and what makes it different from almost all other games out there is the amount of branching, variables, options that we give. Even though the morning/after beach house scene for episode 20 is a relatively small scene, it was an absolute nightmare to write. For example (and this doesn't include all variables checked/tracked in this scene).... For the beach-house sequence in episode 19, there were 8 possible ending scenarios, there were at least 5 different relationship status' with Katie and 4 each with Debbie and Lily plus different options for the Lily / Debbie relationship. And for anyone that knows anything about probability, that is 19x8x.....(you get the idea) differences. So trying to tie off a lot of those path options in episode 20 AND give another 5 after-the fact options, I hope you can understand why it's not just a matter of sitting down and typing out a few lines of dialog. Yes, this is a monster of our own making but it's also one of the things that makes our game unique. Finally: I just wanted to say a big thanks to everyone who is currently supporting this game or anyone who has supported it previously. Thanks, CG |
