I've heard it said that the last 10% of a project is the hardest to finish. The foundations have been laid, all the pieces of the puzzle are in place...and yet there's still a whole checklist of things to do before the work can be considered complete. While VNgen is certainly not done yet, it is this stage where I've found myself for the past couple of weeks, and in more ways than one. Shifting Gears Now, before we get started, there is one other small matter that needs to be addressed: in the past, I introduced Shaft Interactive and Shaftworks as the future brand for VNgen and my other projects. However, upon sharing the name with my fellow developers, it was decided that Shaft could possibly create confusion with the anime studio of the same name (this correlation will make more sense in the near future). After thinking it over a while, I agreed with them, and so will be replacing the Shaft name with something else which will be announced soon. Rebranding is never a fun...

It has now been four weeks since I first introduced perspective into VNgen—a feature carried over from Edge VN that never really worked quite like I had hoped, and for one crucial reason: it was tied to a specific engine element, backgrounds. While this made sense at the time based on the way Edge VN was written, for VNgen I didn't want to merely tack on perspective as an afterthought. As a result, the time gone into it has been lengthy and challenging, but now at last one of the engine's most complex features is complete. A Matter of Perspective Ironically (or perhaps, appropriately) enough, the biggest difficulty was simply figuring out the best way to think about perspective in general. All coordinates inherently have a point of reference on which they are based, but with perspective not being tied to any particular element, what reference point was there? As it turned out, the answer was right in front of me all along: my computer screen. The center of it, to be exact. ...