Dev Log #40 - A rough patch

Hi all, welcome! I hope everyone's doing well this week! Let's get right into the dev log for this week as the end of July fast approaches!

Unfortunate circumstances
It has been a rough week for me since the last weekend due to a personal issue that has surfaced out of nowhere, with one of my family relatives attempting to barge into my home demanding money.

With that said (which is all I will say about the matter), I'm safe and generally fine, although I did find myself more anxious and distracted over the days that followed, resulting in a lack of productivity and general direction. I ended up modding Skyrim and Sims 4 just to keep my mind busy while I got over my frantic thoughts.

I expect this to pass over the coming days as just yesterday I started to pick back up on where I left off and have been working on the game and custom renders since then, with the latter something I'm still aiming to deliver before the end of July, and I'm sorry for the delay!

Game, you say?
Yes! With about 85%-90% of the scenes finalized, I came up with an ending for the episode just a few days ago and will be working my way to figure out how to implement this ending and pack it together with all the episode content that will be presented.

There are a lot of moving parts in my head at the moment with the base pieces already in place, now all that I need to do is fill in certain scenes with the appropriate lead-ins and build up segments, something which I aim to finish 95% of in a few days (with 5% left to do some small adjustments or reorganization)!

What comes after?
Once the story and scene progression is figured out, I will be moving on to completing all my pending custom render work for June/July. Once completed, I will use the whole of August to complete at least 75% of the content of Episode 2.

It is a tall order on the surface, but I believe the planning I'm doing now will give me that edge to quickly execute and render all the necessary visuals for the new episode (this alongside my rendering rig, which is basically all setup and raring to go!).

While I'm not promising a release window right now, what I am saying is that I feel much more organized in terms of knowing what to do than in all the previous episode's development cycles, and I will be using that experience to try and quicken the process wherever possible!

What about animations in Blender?
Regarding this, I will be crystal clear in that I will be putting animated work in Blender on hold for now. This is not to say there won't be any improved animations in Episode 2, but I will be experimenting further in the areas I'm familiar with and I will show more once it is ready!

---------------------------- PROGRESS BREAKDOWN ----------------------------
Story: 85% done. The ending is being deliberated on as well as other major scenes (i.e. building them up appropriately).

Renders: 5% done. Very few renders are completed, but they are most definitely finalized and are shown in weekly previews/lewds.

Dialogue: 0% done. With few renders completed and the story still in the final stages of planning, there is not much progress here.

*** A new section, Gameplay, will be added, and will be used to reflect progress in implementing free-roams and other undisclosed gameplay mechanics!

Gameplay: 0% done. Dialogue has not reached a point where gameplay is needed to be done... yet.
---------------------------- END OF BREAKDOWN ----------------------------

That's all for this week! I do apologize for the lack of substantial progress this week, and I will be picking up my slack over the coming days, and I look forward to sharing more over the coming weeks!

Thank you and stay safe!