Hey everyone!
First of all, thank you so much for your messages of support. They really mean a lot to me!
Regarding my health, things are getting better—I’m having fewer gout flare-ups (about one every two weeks now), which is a good sign. It means the medication is working and my condition is improving. I'll get some blood work done in the next few days and then follow up with my doctor to adjust medication dosages.
Next up, following the poll, I'm going to organize one or more live streams where I’ll set up some renders in front of you. There's no way I’d lose productive time without working, but why not mix work with pleasure, right? I'll try to schedule several sessions, mainly on Saturday and Sunday afternoons or early evenings (Paris time).
As for the game, things are progressing very nicely as well.
The audio work is quite far along: I've created almost all of the sound effects, and all the animations from chapters 0 to 5 now have sound. The only things left to do are integrating the audio into the code, tweaking balances and volumes, and testing. Oh, and of course, creating sound for chapter 6 animations, but that's coming soon.
Regarding the story: Chapter 6 is fully written (except for two spicy scenes, but since those are closely tied to visuals, I usually handle them almost simultaneously). This chapter will have a somewhat different pacing compared to previous ones. The first part has more of a "filler episode" vibe, bringing a lot of lore, background details, and setting up the remaining plots for this book. It’ll take its time resolving some existing storylines and gradually introducing new ones. The second part, however, will be much faster-paced, with action, urgency… Well, you'll see soon enough!
Visually: I've made good progress, even though there’s still quite a lot left to do. I was able to reuse knowledge I'd gained from previous scenes, especially with Blender, which also reassured me for future scenes—particularly some major sequences in book two with even more intense VFX than we've seen so far. Additionally, I've experimented with some short animations (a few seconds each) to enrich the atmosphere. And currently, I'm working on a massive animation—I think we can call it a cinematic at this point. Honestly, it’s pushing my PC to its limits and forcing me to learn even more about Blender. But a nice side effect is that I'm picking up a ton of new tricks for future animations as well. (Oh boy, if only you knew all the cool little VFX I’ve learned to make now…)
Also, I've decided to invest in a one-day training course focused on character animation in Blender, to speed things up. Even though I might not do the final renders in Blender (it wouldn’t match the quality of Daz renders), it still allows me to animate characters within Blender and then import them into Daz. But first, obviously, I need to know how to do it properly—hence the training.
And here's where we're currently at:
800 static renders
28 animations
2700 fully completed script lines
1000 lines of dialogue waiting to be scripted and implemented
As you can see, progress is solid, though we're not at the finish line just yet.
Thank you all again for your amazing support, and see you soon!