Production update 2025-02-19

Hello everyone!

I was planning on making this post on Monday, but unfortunately, exactly like it happened for Part 1, the instant I finished the production schedule for Part 3 this past Sunday, I fell violently ill with stomach flu. Again.

I'm feeling much better today, but I'm definitely still recovering. I'm gonna keep a very light workload today and start proper work on Part 3 tomorrow. So, after tweaking the production schedule to account for that, here's what it looks like!

 I've also got the summary, but so far, not much to talk about.

The script is not actually 100% completed as there are some tweaks and little details I want to add, but it's close enough. The final thing will probably be close to 8500 words like Part 2.

The release date is unclear for now, I put the 28th because that's the last Friday of the month and I want to leave myself a bit of a buffer because I'm gonna have a busy March outside of work. I'll try tracking my hours on this one as well, although it's gonna be misleading because the entire script was written while I was working on what I thought would be just a Part 2. Including writing the script for both parts, Part 2 amounted to roughly 250 hours, so I would guess Part 3 will add up to 150-180.

Part 2 release

I don't know the exact date of the release of Part 2 yet, but I'm almost 100% positive it's gonna be before the end of this month. I'm supposed to receive a package from the sponsor in two days and I'm still waiting on their guidelines for the segment.

Music release

So, what about the new music from Part 2? When is that coming out? Well, it would have been last Sunday until I got sick, so I'm doing it today! It'll be out on Patreon later during the day. Since I put up a whole video early access for Tier 2+ this time, I decided to give the early music access to everyone on Patreon this time, so for all you lowly peasants of Tier 1, it'll be a nice little teaser for the music from Part 2. ⁽ᵀʰᵃᵗ ʷᵃˢ ᵃ ʲᵒᵏᵉ ᵇʸ ᵗʰᵉ ʷᵃʸ ᴵ ˡᵒᵛᵉ ʸᵒᵘ ᵃˡˡ ᵗʰᵉ ˢᵃᵐᵉ ʳᵉᵍᵃʳᵈˡᵉˢˢ ᵒᶠ ʸᵒᵘʳ ᵖˡᵉᵈᵍᵉ⁾

Cracking the Cryptic

By the way, I screamed it on all the rooftops already, but for those who didn't see it, I collaborated on a video with Simon from Cracking the Cryptic! I solved a sudoku with him and has a wonderful time. He became a fan of my channel in the meantime which warmed my heart so much, you could see me beaming for the entire video. Anyway, go check it out! Cracking the Cryptic is a great channel and the puzzles they solve on there are fascinating.

Despite being very much a numbers person, I was personally never that much of a fan of Sudoku, as I always felt like it didn't involve that much reasoning and logic, but was more about finding where this rule and that rule would help make progress, if that makes sense.

However, Cracking the Cryptic, more than 4 years ago now, has made me discover the wonderful world of variant Sudoku! You may already be familiar with Killer Sudoku, where there are cages outlined on the grid with a number in the corner that all the digits inside must sum to. Variant Sudoku is a bit like that: it has the basic Sudoku rules with the numbers 1 to 9 appearing only once per row, column and 3x3 box, but also adds a wide variety of creative rules to make all sorts of brilliant puzzles! People construct these puzzles manually and very meticulously to take you through a journey of logical deductions to reach the unique solution.

For example, the puzzle I solved with Simon included a few killer cages, some marked with a sum, some marked with a O that meant the sum was some unknown odd number. Finally, there were pink lines strewn about the puzzles. Pink lines are Renban lines: they contain a set of non-repeating consecutive numbers in any order. Say you have a renban with a length of 4 that you know contains a 3, you know for sure it cannot contain a 7, 8 or 9 because it can only be made up of the numbers 1234, 2345 or 3456 in some permutation or another. And just with those clues, we were able to fill up the grid in some 40 minutes!

Simon is an absolute gem of a person that you can't help but immediately love. He is a master Sudoku solver, but what he's truly unique for is his world class ability at praising the constructors of these puzzles. His almost child-like wonder at the beauty of the logic will never fail to make you smile and brighten your day. Here's my video on the channel, and here's the video that initially got me hooked on Cracking the Cryptic. It's delightful to see and share's Simon astronishment at how this puzzle develops.

Editing screenshots

And now, the section of the update where I show you all the cool stuff I made while editing the past [checks notes] 0 minutes of video!

And that concludes the update! See you next week!