Dev Update - 2024/01/26

Hey everyone,

the new year 2024 seems to keep throwing wrenches into my work.
Be it my own health or my family, this week it was my PC.

Last Friday, I said I wanted to finish the test build early this week.
Last Friday (evening), life said "eheheh... middle finger" and sent a power outage to roast one of my hard disks.

Out of the 4 disks in my PC, it hit the SSD with all the TNT stuff on it (of course). All rendered images, all DAZ scenes, and all kit-bashed assets were on that SSD.

While I do have a backup (2 actually), the backup is from the end of December 2023. 3 weeks of rendering work gone.

So instead of rendering the final images for the test build, I spent the whole weekend desperately trying to get the SSD back to functional or at least recover the data from it.
I failed on the first task but mostly succeded on the 2nd one.

By Monday I had most of the critical stuff recovered (it was painfully slow but at least it worked). Cost me 2 days of work and nerves (and ~200€ for a new SSD and the recovery software...) but that's still better than having to re-pose and render 260 images...

Lessons learned:
- do backups more often
- look into buying an UPS

It did come with one positive thing, though. While sitting there waiting and praying for the recovery to succeed I had an idea for a small animation that wasn't planned.

So as the wise people say: Always look on the bright side of life! :-)

After I dealt with the SSD fallout, I got back to setting up the remaining renders and created my test build (on Thursday now).
The numbers for this week are:
57 new static renders, 264 recovered renders, for a total of 321
1 new animation, 1 recovered, for a total of... 2 (didn't even need a calculator for this one!)
80 new script lines for a total of 1101

The plan for next week? Same thing I do every week... try to take over the world, gnarf.

Other news and stuff:
I released my Demo on Steam earlier today in preparation for the Steam Next Fest on Feb 05.
You can find it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2639380/The_Neverwhere_Tales__Book_1/
And while you're there, you can give the game a wishlist if you haven't done already ;-)

In the process of setting up the Steam stuff and Next Fest, I'll make the switch to the game being paywalled.
I already mentioned it earlier, releasing on Steam forces you to do that and I want a (mostly) clean cut.
The demo (up to the end of Chapter 3) will be free (and I don't intend to take it down after Next Fest), everything after that will be paywalled.

I already made that switch on itch.io, Patreon will follow within the next few days, which means the Chaplain tier will be discontinued and a new Chaplain tier with a higher price will be introduced.

Both Chaplain tiers will have access to a Steam key (if they want) and the download links for the Chapters after Chapter 3.

Lower tiers will have access to the DL links and a Steam key if the lifetime support matches (or exceeds) the Steam price.

That's it for now.
I wish you guys a nice weekend and I'm thrilled to see what life throws at me next week... ;-)

Cheers,
Ceolag