Hello and Happy New Year, everyone,

This first Dev Log of Chapter 8 will be a bit longer than the usual ones.

A word of warning: if you haven\'t played Chapter 7, the latter part of this Dev log contains slight spoilers, so you might stop reading this Dev Log until you have played it.\nThe spoilers won\'t be anything major, though.\nUp to you. :-)

Overall, I\'m pretty happy with how the release of Chapter 7 went. We missed a few minor bugs, like textlines showing up when they shouldn\'t, but no bugs in the game logic (as far as I\'m aware).\nThe current version is v0.7.0.3, which is live on Steam.\nDecember on Steam also went pretty well, so thank you to everyone who bought the game here and/or helped with a review.

As I mentioned before, I started working on Chapter 8.\nThe progress wasn\'t swift due to the holidays and all the distractions throughout that time, though.\nOne thing I decided to change is how the code for CH8 is organized.\nUntil CH7, every Chapter has one script file with (almost) all necessary stuff for that Chapter in it.\nThose files end up almost 8000 lines long (CH6), which wasn\'t a problem until now.\nTechnically, it doesn\'t really matter, but when translations come in, it gets annoying.\nThe tl-files tend to get significantly longer than the script files. Up to almost 20,000 lines per file. And when you start translating a Chapter, you have that huge wall of text in front of you.\nSo I decided to change the structure of the script files a little and have one file for each scene.\nThat should make translating the game a little easier for me... let\'s see if the amount of additional files will drive me crazy instead :-D

I hope that the new approach will also help to keep the branching of the story manageable.\nThose of you who have already played CH7 know that it ends at different spots, depending on your choices.\nThis branching will also run through Chapter 8 and a bigger part of Chapter 9.\nHaving every branch in one file like before will be one hell of a search-and-find mission in the code.

Speaking of branching, one of the paths in Chapter 8 will be lfheimr if you accepted Titania\'s offer.\nIt will be the biggest part in Chapter 8 and will take up the most dev time.\nIt won\'t be like Chapter 5, where you hardly see any of the other 3 LI\'s, but those 3 will have significantly less screen time compared to lfheimr.\nI\'m not entirely happy with that, but it\'s either that or a development time of 1 year for Chapter 8.\nIt\'s the price I have to pay for a branching storyline.\n\nI still want to make sure that the non-lfheimr path still has a few memorable \"moments\" in it.

Okay, this is getting ass-long, and I\'m sure it triggers quite a few questions on your side.\nFeel free to post them in the comments, and I\'ll try to answer them in a later Dev Log or another Q&A session.\n\nThe numbers for CH8 as of now:\n33 static renders\n0 animations\n479 lines in the script file\n\nHave a nice start to the week, guys.\n\nCheers,\nCeo