Hello my friends and happy weekend!

Over the last week, I completed several tasks that needed to be done. The intro video was one of them along with the main menu screen animation, which you got to see in devlog 5. That has now been coded in. I also prefabbed some scene locations... I'm still working on that a little, but nearly done. I've already rendered a complete scene as well. So, I'm well into the rendering stage now. Coding is complete (outside of coding in animations as I get to those and fixing some scenes in episode 1 where there is a bunch of dialogue but no images).

I still also plan on adding episode start images. These will basically be sexy images or maybe scenes that relate to something that happens in the episode. I will be adding these for episodes 2, 3, and 4 to catch up... and will add them going forward with each new episode release. I felt like something needed to be added between each episode and my wife actually made the suggestion.

I did begin looking into creating a sort-of replay gallery. Basically, it will be an episode player where you can select the episode you want to watch again instead of creating saves or playing through from the beginning. At the end of each episode, I always say something like "back up a page or two and save your game". And generally, this was your way to keep track of each episode, so you're all set when the next one releases. What I want to do is make it so that when I add an episode, you can simply open the 'episodes' menu and click on the latest episode. And you can still use your save if you choose to do that. I am still working out some kinks in this idea because if someone who has never played before tries to start an episode before they've gone through the character naming and all that, well it will be weird for them. So, I'm experimenting with adding a variable at the beginning that if you don't cross that point (after naming character), then the episodes page will be there, but inactive. Once they've done the naming stuff and that is saved in the 'persistent' file, then they can play any episode they want (the page becomes active). Well, that is the idea at least. I may wait one more update to put this in though since this is a longer episode than most. We'll see how it goes.

My plan for this weekend is to fix episode 1 (the missing images when they're supposed to be walking through the space station to get to the Aurora). That shouldn't take me too long, so hopefully I'll also get some more renders done on the scenes. By the way, there are 19 scenes. Not as many as the previous episode, but some are quite a bit longer than others. Basically, when the 'location' changes in the story, I label that as a new scene (label lh4scene019 - for example). Then, when I work on the rendering, I can focus on a scene at a time. It might sound goofy, but it actually helps me a lot - having a goal to finish each scene, until all 19 are done.

Well, that's it for now. Mother's Day recently passed and at the end of this episode is a scene sort of related to that. You'll understand when you see it. Anyway, back to work! I'm shooting for this to release by my birthday, which is July 28th. Would be nice if I could finish all these graphics before then but realistically, I doubt that will happen. I'll keep you posted. Enjoy your weekend! Love you all, ...Fire