May the 4th be with you!

Hi all!

I wanted to drop in and give everyone an update on my next steps.

I hope everyone enjoyed the rest of Episode 3. I feel they are my strongest scenes yet, and they’ve started to give a more in-depth view to some of the characters. I really enjoyed rendering the afternoon scenes and trying out some new techniques.

Translations:

Before I jump fully into Episode 4, I wanted to take this opportunity to address an item that I've been asked about on a frequent basis. Translations...

I'm already storyboarding Episode 4, but before I start the writing and rendering, I've been going through the other episodes to correct ALL the spelling and grammar issues I find (embarrassingly, there are LOADS!), with the main goal to start generating translations. It's important I do this step before translating because obviously I want to avoid the GIGA (garbage in, garbage out) issue that I would potentially face. The text needs to be as good as it possibly can to give the translations their best chance of success.

I did look into getting them done manually, but it just wasn't financially viable.

The only financially viable method of translations is to have them generated by a translation engine, or to use AI. The quotes I received for a manual translation were around £2000 per language. Somehow Jury has made it's way to 200k words, so it’s not really a viable option at this point. Potentially after I've generated the initial translations using an engine, I could get them proofread and corrected, which is much cheaper, but would yield a decent result.

Having the translations done, does benefit everyone, though, because as I'm going through every single line, I'm picking up on some unresolved variables that I can bring back in Episode 4, as well as making the game more playable. I think my writing has improved since I started the game, so with this re-read, I'm not only fixing errors, but re-wording lines of dialogue to ensure they are more digestible.

Episode 4:

As I mentioned above, I am currently still in the storyboarding phase. I've pretty much already done the day following Episode 3, so I have another day to plan out before I can get started.

Outstanding Bugs:

I do read the comments, even if I don't reply to them all. I can see there are some issues in the Steam release where some of the achievements aren't triggering. I've fixed those locally (on my pc), and will roll them out when I can. However, I'm still fixing up these dialogue changes, and will need to speed run the game to ensure I've not accidentally broken anything in the process. So, I will get a release out as soon as I'm sure that I've not broken anything, and that will address those achievement issues.

I'm also aware of a few other items, like the wrong images being shown in a few places.

Anyway, to finish off this post, I thought you might like some of the SFW renders that were voted for by the community. Enjoy them, and May the 4th be with you!

Nickle3DArt