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I figured I'd start with some personal life updates.
Starting with the eye, it ended up being exactly what I thought it was. Just swelling due to rubbing it like an idiot. For those unaware, I do have RCE in both eyes. My left being far worse than my right, the latter of which rarely bothers me. After using Manuka Honey, most of my problems have faded (irritation, constantly feeling like something's in it, etc.), provided I use rewetting drops and night time ointments (shit's expensive, man...). But I do have flareups sometimes, and that was one of those times.Of course, someone took that to mean that I was delaying working on MTC when all I ever said was that it might slow me down for a few days. Which it really didn't. Anyways, all is good on that front. I'm actually feeling healthier than I have in some time, so I suppose that's a good thing.On the topic of the family member legal stuff (more on pinned Patreon post if you care to read, but still fairly vague for obvious reason). I never said I was being sued for it. But investigated. And obviously, those were dismissed pretty quickly. I am, however, pursuing other legal matters toward the situation. Not that it should effect anything beyond a day here or there.Still busier than I'd like to be with work, but my schedule has opened up a bit since I'm not doing on-call work anymore outside of emergency situations. Sleep has also been better because of that. But that's enough about me. Let's get to the updates here. What most of you are really here for.Total renders will end up being around 667. This will be in the ballpark of the final number. Give or take 10 renders. As there might be dupes, renders I disklike, etc. Happens every update.
637 of those renders are the story renders. The remainder belong to if/else statements belonging to specific scenes.
Total is likely to be very slightly more as there's still some post-lewd renders to do, but should only take as long as the animations take. But again, depends on how much work needs to be done on post-animation scene and whether I'll remove any renders or not.
It it ended up being a bit longer than I wanted. Meaning, there's more to do and ends up making the update take a bit longer. Not meaningfully, but you get the idea.
There's 7 total scenes in this update, though it's more like 12.
There's a bit of nuance here in that a pair of scenes have multiple scene changes.
One of which has three environment changes within the scene (basically implying something of a scene that last throughout the day)
The other scene is two, but technically 3? Hard to explain without spoiling.
Simplified Chinese is done for Episodes 1 through 4.
It took a bit longer than I expected. Mostly due to hitting session limits with Claude Pro. Definitely need to upgrade to Max for translating, but will dedicate that to next update.
If you take a look at the website, you'll see the next two planned languages and the progress bars for them. For P1, they'll remain at 0. However, they should both be added for P2.
Following those three, languages will be done on a poll-by-poll basis.
P1 of Episode 5 shouldn't take very long to translate by comparison.
I still need to build out the translation page, but largely a non-issue as I'll be likely just copy-pasting much of the base code from other menus.
If anyone has some good recommendations for Simplified Chinese fonts, that'd be great.
I don't have an exact number of renders made right now, last I counted was 375, and I think I've done 10-ish today so far. Either way, we're roughly about 80% done with the 500 planned renders. Again, may or may not go slightly over that to close out the update cleanly. I don't think a hard cutoff would be appreciated even in this format.
We're currently at about 4 scenes. Two of which are quite long. We've paused on the third scene as there will be animations, the same will likely be true of the fourth as well. It's more to do with the if/else stuff that'll come with those scenes and the alt renders needed for them.
Total, I'm envisioning 6-ish total scenes for the update. Might put us closer to 600-700 renders, but some prep leading into the P2 is a bit necessary here.
We've got 30-ish renders actually cooked and waiting, but shouldn't take too long to cook all the renders.
As mentioned before, we'll be finishing up renders and then starting work on the animated scenes.
We're working with Simplified Chinese for the first translation as mentioned, it's being implemented, but it'll probably be the last thing finished for this update. It's not exactly a priority.
Thanks for holding out. That especially goes for anyone at this tier. This kind of support goes a long way in keeping the game going. And after waiting this long, I wish there was more too. But as said already, changes are coming to prevent this kind of wait again.
There's lot of thing I've played around with this in update. Much of it being AI. Not to take over the game or its animations, or writing. But as a tool. Stuff that can take simple still renders and give them a little motion. The only scene that seriously made use of AI animations was certain scene later on. Most should be able to pick it out rather quickly. Like I said, it's simply to give a little extra life to certain renders. Largely in the closer/transition scenes. AI music is affordable, and far less tedious to find quality in. Yeah, some of the lyrics might be eh, and it might be a little formulaic. But it beats spending hours sifting through mediocre work to find something that halfway works, and that's for those that choose to listen to the game's audio. Which I don't think there's many of.Since I've had someone bring it up already, I know there's not a lot of lewds, and only a couple scenes in this one isn't adding too much to that. Just keep around until Season 2 and on. You'll be rewarded for the wait, I want the world and characters/dynamics to be built before I dive too far into the lewd content. Episode 4 is about as dialogue heavy as Episode 3 was, and while MC keeps the same energy as his usual self, this episode goes a little deeper into the protagonist as well as both levels of his past. Continuing from before he met Laura and him in court. The events that started to shape who and what he is now. All while multiple forms of danger get closer and closer to himself and the people cares about. Episode 4, and some of Episode 5 are going to feature a lot of foreshadowing and some hints. Stuff that might not make sense now is going to later.In this update, I put a lot of emphasis on getting the spelling/grammar/double words/etc. out. As much as a human and a bit of Claude can do, and trying some new things. I know my animations aren't really on par with the rest of the visual fidelity, and it's something I want to work on, but one of the harder things to wrap my head around for some reason. Me and keyframes are like dogs and cats sometimes. Anyways, onto what everyone's here for:Changelog:1,943 renders. Was closer to 1,970, but there were some duds that I didn't really like or had some major stuff wrong with them. Brings us to a total of 6,100 renders.
11 Daz-made animations
18 AI-Generated animations, 1 of which is a longer one (multiple minutes) that was mentioned above
124 new songs (typically 3 per scene, but longer and shorter will get more/less.), 37 SFX Tracks, most are AI or partially AI generated
Removed glossary button on top-left. Was a bitch to manage. It's far easier to just add the def tag per-word in dialogue/exposition.
This did result in a small error where lifting scene hint/tip is hidden in the upper left by letterboxing during flashbacks/or those who have letterboxing on. It should be there at beginning of most scenes and it peaks through. If I do a 4.5, I'll fix that. Otherwise it's a small enough issue to fix with episode 5.
Added a "Previously" section/choice at the beginning. In all honesty, it's pretty shitty. I may fix it to be a bit more depth. but there was a lot of content to fit in there and was struggling to fit a enough but not too much. So, I just handed it to Claude who did an equally bad job.
There's a couple of the AI animations I'd like to fix as the lack of looping is quite noticeable, but mostly an under the hood issue that'll be doing.
Thorough spell/grammar/etc. check for all previous episodes. Will be doing a massive code/bug/consistency clean-up at the end of Season 1 following the final episode of to ensure a clean as possible save carryover from Season 1 to Season 2. More on that soon.
Added a translation button in settings, preparing for future translations. AI, human, volunteer, or otherwise.
Hope to implement a correction system for this, as well.
I know AI isn't especially ideal for some when it comes to translations, but average/good translations from AI are better than no translations. Human translation just isn't affordable for the amount of content in-game right now.
There's some news, mostly good, but it's mostly been chugging away at renders. Have had a busy few weeks at work, but such is the case for a full time job and a hobby project. We also have a website in working order now, with (more or less) live tracking of progress. Which can be viewed here:
https://missftn.com/move-the-chains-play-sheets/
A little side warning on the site - it hasn't been optimized for mobile at all yet. It's still basically a broken mess. So, for those that can't see it, here's a screenshot:
There's also some movement in regard to translations. Maybe not in the way I wanted, but movement nonetheless. But more on that below.
As you can see by the screenshot, we're right around 1,300 renders. Which, ideally, puts us over the halfway mark. This is a very LI-centric update in getting to know the background of some of the LIs, specifically some of the ones that haven't gotten a ton of focus yet. So, if you aren't into a fair chunk of talking, then it might be a CTRL-heavy update for you.
Like I've mentioned previously, Season 1 has always been a world-building and character development focus portion of the AVN. The pace of everything is going to pick up in Season 2. From the story to the lewds. It's always been about building the antagonists and giving the main characters a foundation to create a layer of humanity in them. Whether or not that struck with many players is hard to gauge, though. Hopefully it does for some, at least.
I know a lot people want the lewds right away, but I hope building relationships can create more of a connection to characters in that way. Rather than going the way of another game that has a similar color scheme - or the many like it. Yeah, it's a harem game. But I want it to be more than just that at the same time. Anyways, pompous devs thoughts aside, moving on. . .
Speaking of lewds and animations, not much has changed on that front. As I mentioned above, this probably going to be one of the more lacking updates in regard to lewds. Just to be 100% transparent. There'll be animations and such, but some might find the number of lewd scenes lacking.
The game scenes will likely take place in Blender. This will stretch out development time a bit for Episode 5, but I think the quality of the previously mentioned stadium addon (See Play Sheet #13 here.) is worth it.
On the topic of Blender stuff. if you've seen posts on Twitter and Reddit, there's been some movement on the WWJK rework, titled Lovesong. The reason I haven't posted here is I'm not looking to spam supporters with every little detail. Once all the models are released, there'll be a longer post here with some exclusive bits of info. Possibly even an early look at the teaser.
For those that haven't followed/coming across it for the first time: Lovesong is a total rework of my first project, We Were Just Kids. This is a complete and total background project. That I work on in free time, often when I'm done with MTC for the day. It won't be getting in the way of MTC at all. You can find a bit more information here and here.
I'm trying to sprinkle in some writing in my free time, typically at lunch. But hard to get a lot done in 30-40 minutes.
I do have a main proofreader in the works, however I can always use more. I'll probably be doing a wider scale reach out as release gets closer. This would hopefully be the same people consistently.
That about covers it for the general updates. I think.
Starting with the aforementioned Translations. I've been looking for a bit, and just can't seem to find a reasonably priced Chinese Translator. The one I did find was pretty backed up. I've been told by a couple other devs that Google's Gemini Pro AI has put out some very good results. I figure between the Community correction and possibly hiring a proofreader to go said language would be enough to get a good enough translation out there. Most devs aren't willing to share their translators. It's not perfect, but it'll be better than nothing at all.
Simplified Chinese will be the first, and followed by French. We'll go from there once both of those are done.
Between the length of the game and the move to Blender for said scene, I do expect a slightly longer development time in Episode 5. To mitigate this, I'm think I'll split Episode 5 into Part 1 and Part 2 at roughly a 1000 renders each. So, instead of waiting a year for the entire update. Part of it will be out sooner and the rest of the update will happen after. Not a final choice, but something I've been thinking about. The community has my ear on this one.
I'm trying to trim a bit of fat for Episode 5 to be the final one for Season 1 (putting it at roughly 9k-10k renders total), but it's possible that there may end up being a short addition to Season 1 to close up some storylines and segue into new ones/build on existing ones for Season 2.
Episode 5 will probably have some minor UI tweaks like adding another toggle menu button to the preferences screen. But nothing major.
That's about it for this play sheet, though. Not a ton of new information, but felt there was enough to put out there. Here's some preview images right from the press. As is usual, ignore noise and such as none of these have any postwork.
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This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Move The Chains - Season 1, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Move The Chains - Season 1 statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.