Episode 6 - Progress Report #2

Hey everyone

So... I'm gonna talk a little about my plans for Episode 6 here, and this will touch on some mild Ep. 5 spoilers. If you don't want any of that, leave now! 🙂

I'm currently still in the writing phase, and probably will be for a little while longer too. At a guess, I'd say I have around 40% of that part done.

Looking at how much I've written so far and how much is still left to do, I'm already afraid that this episode is gonna be huge as well. I actually had the silly notion that this one could finally be a bit of a smaller one again, but currently it really doesn't look like it 😅.

Episode 6 will be a very special one, for a bunch of reasons. Some of you might've already guessed it: The whole next episode will be taking place during just the one party night. There's a lot of things happening there, and a lot of important characters are visiting, so you can expect a wild night for sure.

So this unique setup for the episode brings some challenges with it. Both in the writing department and the technical side.

On the narrative side, I want to experiment a little as well, since this gives me some good opportunities for it. Mainly I want this episode to be a bit less linear than usual and have a lot of different ways on how this whole thing can play out. Since this is a bit more of an isolated event, there's a lot of room to play around with diverging paths and such, without making my life miserable in the future with too many loose ends 😅. (But of course, there's still a bunch of things that will have consequences later on, so this is definitely not just some fun spin-off episode 😉)

I even played around with the idea to make this episode kind of a sandbox-lite thing in some parts, but ultimately decided against it. The extra headaches with writing in regards to different world states and timelines and all that wasn't worth it in my opinion. At least not in the way I've imagined it. Especially since I can tell you already that this episode will be the most complex one yet with branching and such, even without the sandbox elements.

I'm of course not even halfway done yet, so things might still change if I see it not working out, or if the episode just gets way too big. This is another difficulty I'm facing right now, since usually I can just kind of push certain things back into another episode if it gets too big. But there's no way to do that here, since I'm not gonna spread this party over more than one episode. (I actually had kind of the same issue in the last episode, since I needed to fit all the pre-party stuff in there too)

There will also be some challenges with renders that I'm already aware of. In particular the fact that there's a lot of people attending the party. Big crowds are a tricky thing to do in DAZ, especially when you don't just want blurry shadow people or obvious cardboard cutouts in the background, while still wanting the place to feel lively and packed. I'll need some time to figure out what works best here... I have some ideas, but I just need to find a way to implement that in my workflow without slowing everything down too much. And also... I'll need to create a lot of background characters. Like... a lot 😬.

This time I'll also need to pretty much finish all environments and new characters (or at least a big portion of background characters) before I even start doing renders. So it could take a while until I'll have some previews to show, unfortunately.

All in all I'm very excited for this episode, but I'm also a little nervous since there's a lot of tricky things to juggle here. We'll see how it goes! 😊

❤️ Enjoy your weekend! ❤️