While development has been a vicious hydra of timesuck – CG for future bits, CG for DCR, CG for stuff I may never use, new dummies, script for TV.2, revisions for DCR.2, overplot, script ideas for “inserts” between stories that would be totally viable if this thing ever becomes an Ongoing Series, cover musings, structural musings, CG I Need To Make musings, website musings, Comp CD musings, how do I get moar eyeballs plz musings and OH YEAH THE SECOND EDITION – I’ve managed to make some Meaningful Progress in a couple of key areas and now have a reasonably sane timetable for near-future events.

It goes something like this:

1. Chapter Four (Clarity). Formatting work is ongoing – as of this writing I’ve done one redraw and two pages of renders. This chapter has an expanded scene in it, so I’ll have to start preparing to tackle that in short order. Lots of CG and lineart.

2. Chapter Covers. The CG backdrops for 1-4 are already done. I’ve showed them to my channelmates on IRC, and the general consensus is that they’re Nifty. The new cover formatting is not the current cover formatting – it’s intended for hardcopy and unlike previous bouts of handwaving, hardcopy is where this thing is heading. Slowly.

Getting this covers ground out is filling me with a peculiar sense of Rightness regarding the future of the book. I may well have finally devised something that Actually Works.

I still need to generate the cover for Incursion – the formula’s going to be a bit different than it is for the individual chapters, so I’ll need to do more with the thinking before that pops out. The intent is to work on the Cover artwork while Chapter Four is in reproduction rendering. Usually when ATC is Rendering I busy myself with drawing porn – but I’m almost an adult*, dammit. Time to be making more… useful… uh… use of my time. Or something.

3. After Clarity is done, Incursion (the first half) will be complete, which means it’ll be time for Proofing of the first half. Xeno gets to do his thing, I get to implement fixes. And then implement the first half for print, covers and everything. I’ll probably sit on it until the second half is Done, just in case I wind up needing to make some last minute changes or revisions or whatever, but better to have it Pretty Much Finished by the time I’m done with the second edition than to finish the web version and then have to do the entire hardcopy thing all at once. I did that with the first edition and it sucked.

4. While Xeno’s Xenoing, I’ll be working on a new version of the website. I’ve muttered about this previously – When I start rolling on Expulsion (the second half of the story), I’ll be rolling out a tweaked site. More on that when it gets closer to happening.

You’ll notice there’s no CG modeling work anywhere on that list. Fact is, much as I enjoy banging out spaceships in Silo (and as much as I hate texturing them), everything I need for this chapter already exists… and working on anything I don’t need for this chapter is only going to slow me down.

The first bit of Expulsion is entirely new CG, however – so after all of the above is done, I’ll need to do some modeling and texturing work. The model in question is damned near complete – it just needs some detailing and maps. It’s a plot-critical DCR object to boot, so having it Done (when I Need It, no less) will clear out a sizable roadblock on that project.

Long-term, my current plan is to finish the reformat of The Dualist, do the correction work on TV.1**, finish DCR.2, then move on to TV.2. There’s still FAR TOO MUCH work in front of me, but for the time being there’s at least a semblance of order to it.

Some sense of priority.

* I’ll be 30 in one month. Oh noes!

** I refer specifically to Ornix’s shirt, which needs to be fixed in both The Dualist and TV. I’ll probably revise the hell out of the dialogue while I’m at it.