An unfortunate delay

Usually around this time of the month, I'm here to announce the pending release of the new chapter. Unfortunately, there's been a minor delay. Due to the sheer volume of content in this chapter, I knew it'd take a little longer than normal, but...

Anyone who says a SSD doesn't have moving parts that can't be broken is FULL OF SHIT. And you have my permission to tell them to go to hell. 

I dropped my SSD the other day off of my desk and it refused to boot up, only clicking to let me know it was getting power. After opening it up, I noticed that the armature necessary to read the data was broken. What does this mean?

The BAD

• Basically I lost recent copies of everything. All my scene data since the last backup is gone. It was less than a month's worth, but entirely all the content from this update and some work for the endings has just ceased to exist.  
• I have to reinstall everything and make sure it's running right AGAIN. Where this will be a problem is the custom settings I use for video output from Premier Pro and the tweaks I made to the Ren'Py SDK to make android builds take less time.
• All of the animations for this chapter are gone. I was going to back them up today, so that's super bad timing. More on that in the good.

The GOOD

• I had a backup of the code and script in my main drive and a thumb drive. Outside of some clean up and testing the code, this is done. Say 98-99% In fact, I was about to do the last script clean up before this happened. There are probably some hiccups in the recovered code that'll need to be ironed out, but that beats rewriting the entire chapter.
• I have a backup of the renders from a day before losing the drive. Meaning that outside of a few reshoots (probably 15 images out of almost 1200), I was done with that. 
• Animations will have to be recreated but this will hopefully only take a couple of days to do. All of the locations are already existing sets, so it's a matter of reposing and making sure the lighting and camera effects are the same. By the time you read this, I'll probably already have most of Sydney's reshoots done (I knocked out three of the animations in the hour before work this morning). 

So, the release will have to be delayed, but it shouldn't be too long. A lot of what has to happen is just filling in the spots that were lost and since I already know what the scenes should look like and the script and code is already locked in, it should just be a matter of getting time to work on it.

All apologies for the delay, but let me assure you that this chapter is pretty damn big. Not as big as Chapter 16, but it probably clocks in as a top three in terms of content. As I mentioned on the Discord, the final action set piece is over 240 unique renders (including 50+ in the last sequence) with multiple variations on how to get to the end. 

-Kinderfeld