Well, I feel like I've done a lot and not very much at the same time. The entire guild mission is coded into renpy, apart from a romance scene that I will script as I put the sprites and animations together for it.

This isn't the longest chapter/event I've done, but it's definitely the most complex. There's a fair bit of spells and combat, a detailed adult scene and a fairly large number of backgrounds, as well as multiple versions of backgrounds. For example, there is a scene where I create the background I want, then I animate that background having the camera move around the scene, then make new backgrounds from what the animation has put together. So I can have the action move to different parts of the same scene and it look consistent.

Over the weekend I was working on the adult scene, trying to improve the method I used for the one with Isabella. I won't go into the details, but the results were far better than I expected. So now I can put together high quality sprites for these scenes and then have them animated together. So I have high hopes for this scene. Having said that, I tried the method again today, using some different parameters and it really didn't want to cooperate. But that is a surprisingly common pitfall of working with AI tools. Anyway, all the sprite assets are generated, quite a few animations are done as well. I'm about a third of the way through adding in the sprites and animations to the script file. I hope to have that all done by this time next week.

Then I will have to work on the audio, which will be quite in depth because there's a lot of scene and tone changes which means different music/ambience + multiple combat scenes, spells etc. So I'll need to be sourcing or creating a fair few sound effects.

I've also been playing around with some new features (new to me anyway) for image and animations. The ice spell in chapter 1 turned out pretty well, but I've found a way to do something much more in depth. Using image references; plug in one or more existing images to an image generator and it will generate a similar image but with new features based on your prompt and any other images you plugged in. If I was doing the ice scene again now, I'd take the image of the slaver, plug that in then have the image adjusted to include ice beginning to appear, then plug the newly generated image in an additional reference, then increase the amount of ice and gore, then plug that image in, then have the guy collapse, fall apart etc. And so on and so on. So you can create stages of the effect. Then you can use an image to video animator like Kling, that has the starting image but also the ending image. Animate the first image into the second, the second into the 3rd and so on. Then you get a complete sequence as the spell develops. I've done something like that for this mission and I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, 5-6 separate animations that are plugged together to produce one long sequence.

So I've been doing lots of experimenting, which is why I feel like I've done a lot and not very much, as I feel like I should be further along with finishing this mission than I am, based on the amount of time I've spent tinkering with stuff.

When I do get the mission finished, I need to do a little tinkering with the mission system in game to get the mission availability to dynamically update. It hasn't mattered up until now, but this cartographer's guild mission is intended to be the last of the "linear" mission choices. After this, every mission that I add is intended to become available based on criteria (character or guild score, completion of other missions, date etc.). But I need to add something to the character and contract missions screen that forces renpy to update all the variables and update the character or faction icon to show a mission is available. At the moment it's a static system - you reach a point in the game and a variable flips to say the mission is available. What I need to happen is, you score say a +1 aberrant gnosis point and that means you have 10 points and now the mission to back and see Saga and Felsia should be available when you click on the character screen. I also want to add more to the character info screens and the codex.

I've added a new 75 second long framepack animation to my you tube channel of Sarah as a frost mage, in a frosty environment making use of a thermally enchanted gown. Which you can see here:

https://youtube.com/shorts/G13MFepQyto

There are some preview images on my patreon page (free) should you wish to take a sneak peak.  patreon.com/JubsGames