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Progress Report
🕑 Added 2022-02-25 08:48:59 +0000 UTCOkay, since everything else is already out, all there is to cover is Left Hand Magic. The first thing I have to admit to is that...no, despite my best efforts, I'm not going to make the end-of-month deadline. I expect there to be between a 3-5 day delay, at this point. Much of the reason for that has already been covered and I'm not going to beat a dead horse by saying it again. The only two specific things I will mention are that:
A) Installing and setting up the new Graphics Card basically ate an entire day of productivity, which is part of why Silas Station 4 was later than expected.
B) The Daz Studio developers are assholes and they broke one of the most important lighting features that literally everyone uses (well, probably almost everyone), in a mandatory update. That pissed me (and a lot of other people) the hell off as I lost both most of a day figuring out what the hell was going on AND ending up having to buy an alternative option as there is no fix in sight for it. Which is an extra level of suck on top of spending the money for the graphics card. Thankfully, it wasn't super expensive, but it's incredibly irritating that I had to shell out money for essentially an exact (but working) duplicate of a lighting asset I've been using for literally years with no issues. Grr.
Between these two things, any chance of catching up in time was shot down. For the rest of this Progress Report, I will touch on where I am, what I'm expecting schedule-wise, and what the future will look like (hint: that bit is positive).
First, where I am currently. Surprisingly enough, I actually expect to have all renders and animations done by the end of the month. I already have about 80% of the needed still renders and 5/7 of the animations. The first stage of the 6th animation is rendering right now and I expect to be able to run the second stage of it overnight (well, overday technically, since I sleep during the day). The new GPU I added has, so far, proven it was a good decision. It really has cut render times significantly and is a good chunk of why I actually did manage to catch up on the render side of things to a high degree.
Unfortunately, putting all my time and energy into the scramble to catch up on the Render Side of things means I only just started on the actual coding/writing/Sound/Etc tonight. And Left Hand Magic is considerably more complex on that front than...basically any of my other games. The two unfinished games, Eros Academy and Cosplay Cafe came the closest...but Left Hand Magic is a significant step more complex than even those two on the code front. Well within my existing skill level, but it does consume more time on that front than other games.
I expect to have all three of Talia's initial scenes, plus the unique/unlockable Threesome scenes, written and programmed by the end of the month. That, however, leaves the first Major Event and the four possible solutions(one for each girl's route) to the event/problem to cover. I expect each of them to take roughly a full day of work. And then I'll need another day for Editing/Testing/Credits/Upload/Etc. So, on current schedule, that means that the game should be done around the 5th of next month. I'm going to try to shorten that timeframe as much as possible, but that's the rough estimate I have for you all right now. I'll do at least one more progress report at end-of-month to update you on how accurate that estimate is up to that point.
Now, the GOOD news is that, with how well the new GPU is working out, I actually don't think that the delay is going to cause any issues with Haven's Port. With March being a 31 day month, and the improved render speeds I'm now working with, I'm reasonably confident that I'll be able to get a full-sized Haven's Port build out for March, despite losing time at the front of the month to finishing up Left Hand Magic. Better yet, I'm also fairly confident that, going forward, there is a much reduced likelihood of this issue recurring in other Left Hand Magic months. I couldn't quite make up the lost ground this month, as I wasn't able to add the new GPU until the 20th. In future months, I'll have it from the get-go, which should result in a much easier time hitting the monthly deadlines.
