So... where are things at?
Well, as it turns out, "a week or so" wound up more on the side of "or so"...
As for where things stand at the moment: we are very, very close. No dates, but once the final touches have been put on the episode, we'll let everyone know, and the update will drop within a day or two of the announcement.
It won't be this week, thanks to the holiday here in the States, but it will be Soon.
What's taking so long!? You said it'd just be a week!
That's fair...
The main reason? Things STILL took longer than we thought, which caused our schedules to run into other, pre-scheduled obligations in November, which made things take even LONGER, and so here we are.
Additionally, as we running through the game, there were parts that were just not up to the standards we wanted, so we added a couple still CGs and minor animations to get things to where we were happy with it.
A peek into the process...
Just to give you all an idea (and for anyone who's interested in some of the behind the scenes info), here's a rough explanation of the "posing" stage and why it takes so long.
Vaygren makes HEAVY use of camera angels, posable 2d models, and animation. This is how we get the "watching an anime" feel to the game, and it's a lot of work to implement. We're not just switching between static sprites, we have to setup the scene, create the expressions, poses, make sure everything animates properly and is timed appropriately, etc, and then do it all again if it doesn't look right.
Depending on the scene, this means 5 lines of dialog can take 2 or more hours to properly setup the poses, camera angles, and animations. A full scene can take days or weeks, depending on the complexity, and that's WITH the custom toolset we've built to speed things up.
Once Episode 2 is out, we're planning on making a behind the scenes video showing some work on posing scenes for Episode 3.
So....
As we said, we're very VERY close now. It won't be long.
We are more active on Discord and always happy to answer questions about the game's development status or process.
Going forward, once Episode 2 drops, what sort of information would you all like to see in posts regarding Episode 3's progress? Let us know!