Posted August 11, 2023 by Cicada
Hello!
Attached at the top of this post are some previews from Chapter 2. Enjoy!
1 month ago, I released Chapter 1 of Not Going Back. Firstly, I want to thank anyone who has played and enjoyed the game so far. This was a project that I have been working on for a while now, and I committed to finishing it long ago, but actually releasing it felt, naturally, like a major moment. Mostly because there is now a sense of expectation, not only for the game to be finished, but for timely updates.
Naturally with games of this nature, the biggest block in creating Chapter 2 is render times. The images for the game take as long as they take to render, and, while there are things that can be done for optimization, ultimately things can only go so fast. I have been working, I feel, pretty efficiently since the release of Chapter 1, and this is easily the most consistently I've worked on the project.
So, what does that mean for Chapter 2? Well, it is essentially completely written. Some minor scenes and transitional points are not complete, mostly because those are the sort of things I prefer to do as I go to make the renders, or add in after playing through the game. The little bits between the primary scenes of the chapter. The render count currently sits at approx. 600. For context, Chapter 1 contained around 1400 renders. Does this mean that Chapter 2 is nearly halfway done? Unfortunately, no. Chapter 2 is looking like it will be considerably longer than Chapter 1. Good overall for content and story progression etc. but, of course, bad for development times.
Similar to Chapter 1, Chapter 2 covers around another week of time in the story. For what it's worth, this won't be persistent throughout the game. After Chapter 2, there will be more time jumps over days as the story progresses; it's only during these first few weeks of the story where the day-to-day nature of life is particularly relevant. Currently, I have renders complete for the end of the Friday, as well as Saturday, Sunday and most of Monday (as well as scene later on a later day I worked on ahead of time). So, more or less four days done with five more to do. On paper, this also looks like about half the Chapter is done, but the remainder of the week contains a lot of scenes, some quite large with a lot of characters, and generally a lot more content.
All things considered, however, I'm feeling very positive about the update currently. Chapter 2, for me, is such a progression on the story from Chapter 1, which was a lot more of an establishing Chapter, that it has been so much more fun to write and create images for. I'm still learning, of course, with this being my first project of this nature, but to me that only means future improvement.
I'm not sure how frequently people would want to see dev updates in the future. If you have a preference (weekly, fortnightly, monthly) let me know, if not I'll keep it to monthly for now.
Thanks!