Slow but steady progress continues on Chapter 4 of A Shot in the Dark. Since the last dev log, Josselyn has finished writing the Monica and Natalie scenes, and is currently working on fleshing out the Delia scene drafted by writer Mute Hazelnut. The current word count for Chapter 4 is 51K words with 1 more long lewd scene (the Delia one, currently in progress) and 4 shorter story scenes left to write/finish.

The last of the Sophie renders finished rendering this morning, so previews of those will be included in this post. I'm sure it will come as no surprise they are very NSFW! Renders for the Natalie scene will be the focus for the next two weeks. The current render count is 1,414 with 3 lewd scenes (Monica, Natalie, and Delia) and 5 story scenes to go as far as renders.

This update is absolutely packed with content, with all but one love interest getting a full lewd scene. There will be ~20 new memories added to the gallery with Chapter 4, which is more than in previous chapters. We know this chapter is taking a long time to develop, but just know there will be a big payoff at the end, no matter who your favorite characters are!

As we mentioned last dev log, it's highly unlikely we'll have the Chapter 4 update ready to go before the Steam release in mid-December. Writing should definitely be done by then, and renders should be wrapping up if not done, but realistically there isn't time for all the necessary coding and animations to happen in the next 4-5 weeks. Especially since TheOmega is still tying up loose ends with Prince of Suburbia and will have a lot to do for both Steam releases.

The upside to all this will be if Josselyn is able to get ahead on writing and art for Chapter 5 while TheOmega is tied up with coding, animations, and Steam stuff for the next couple months. Earlier this year we had a similar situation when the V0.95 update for Prince of Suburbia was delayed due to Chapter 3 of A Shot in the Dark. We were able to use that time to get ahead on writing and art for the V1.0 update, so that update went a lot faster. A loss for Chapter 4 will hopefully be a gain for Chapter 5 if things work out that way!

We also recently released a super-sized podcast episode (Seedy AF Podcast [Ep18]: Why did development slow down this year?) where we reflect on the many reasons development has been so much slower this year. The tl;dl (too long; didn't... listen?) is that our overly optimistic attempts to scale our business this year ended up costing us far more time than we ever anticipated. We learned a lot of important lessons about ourselves and this business the hard way (including some we basically already knew, but were too stubborn to accept).

We are definitely both what we call "fuck around and find out" kind of people, and believe only big risks lead to big rewards. Of course, big risks also lead to big losses sometimes. When that happens, we accept the loss, learn from it, and move on. As always, we will just keep chugging along and doing what we love, which is making these games for the fans to enjoy!

Thank you, as always, for all of your patience and support. We couldn't do this without you!