Dev Update - 2024/01/05

Hey everyone,

first Dev Log of the year, so Happy New Year to everyone.

I'll go into a few things today so the first part will be the TLDR stuff for those who just care about progress.
I got back into my usual dev work on January 2nd when I started setting up the first renders for Chapter 5.
Before that, I did a bit of planning, setting up some environments for later parts of the chapter, new characters, you get the idea... basic stuff.

I also started writing and coding the first lines of dialogue into Ren'Py.

Of course, the progress was a bit slower than usual because of the holidays. In the end, I still got more done than I expected.

I got 77 renders done this week and the script file contains 660 lines.
Next week's work will be mostly rendering to catch up a bit with the already-written dialogue.

The plan for Chapter 5:

I already mentioned at the end of last year, that Chapters 5 and 6 will be a bit different compared to the first 4 chapters.

Chapter 5 will have no content with Kaija, Elea, and Fiona whilst Chapter 6 will focus on their personal stories.
The reason for it is, that the bigger part of Chapter 5 will focus on a specific part of the world where it doesn't make sense for these 3 to show up.
On what part? Well, you can get an idea if you look at the attached Chapter Title (I usually render these when in Beta but this time I did it early because of this Dev Log).

You can expect more pointy ears in the coming months and throughout Chapter 5.

The first part of Chapter 5 will start where Chapter 4 ended (surprise!) and after a few scenes dealing with the aftermath of Chapter 4's ending (and 2 potential lewd scenes...) the story will move on to show the other side of the impending conflict.

It'll give you a bit more time to explore the Elves of The Neverwhere Tales and a bit more time with the one LI that hardly had any screen time yet.

Some organizational things:

It has also been mentioned before, I need to change the Patreon tiers a bit due to the Steam release later that year.

I'll release the Demo version (up to the end of Chapter 3) of The Neverwhere Tales in early February before the Steam Nextfest starts on Feb 05. 

With the release of the demo, I'll change the Chaplain tier to 13$.

The weekly Dev Logs will be public from now on but preview images will be limited to paying Patrons.
The reason for this is, that I think it makes more sense to keep everyone updated about the progress but since all public posts need to be SFW, I'll just go with the lazy way and keep all posts for the preview images Patron only.

That way I don't have to deal with the decision if something might be considered NSFW and the people who support me still have a bit of exclusive content.

However, this is not set in stone. If you think it's unfair or have any other problem with that approach, feel free to speak your mind or send me a message.

I don't want anyone to feel cheated.

I think that's it for now.
Have a nice weekend, guys

Cheers,
Ceolag