We hope everyone had a happy and healthy holiday season! We took some days off to celebrate Christmas with friends and family, and have returned refreshed and ready to work.

If you haven't already, be sure to check out our annual year in review post: ViM Studios: 2023 Year in Review! That post also talks about our goals and priorities for 2024, most of which have to do with developing A Shot in the Dark.

Since our last official dev log (A Shot in the Dark: Dev Log 18-Dec-2023), the last remaining scene that was left to be written was finished. All that's left to write is the chapter wrap up and Photogram content. The final word count for all the scripts written was between 60K-70K words, and we're estimating about 55K words of pure dialogue. We'll have the exact figure when we prepare the chapter for translation.

Josselyn has been plugging away at renders for Chapter 4. Before Christmas she was able to finish the remaining renders for the Delia lewd scene, and after Christmas she finished the non-lewd renders for the Delia scene. This week she posed all the renders for the Monica scene, about half of which are rendered.

The Delia and Monica scenes were the only remaining lewd scenes from Chapter 4 that needed renders. That means all the "big scenes" are done! Non-lewd scenes typically have far fewer renders, so the ~4 scenes remaining to make renders for will likely not add substantially to the render count (which is currently 1,936). The final render count will probably be around ~2,200 but of course we won't know the actual number until we're done.

TheOmega has been working on coding and animations for Chapter 4, as well as a bug fix for a texting issue that some Steam users were reporting. We got the fix out to Steam players last week. If you were encountering the texting bug with a version purchased on another platform, please let us know so we can get you an updated build.

As mentioned in our end of year wrap up, m. from Tsundere Studio has been working on revamp of the GUI for A Shot in the Dark. They finished up last week! This process went much faster than we anticipated, so although we hadn't originally planned to update the GUI with the Chapter 4 update, we'll now be able to.

We are super happy with the overhaul! Here are some previews: