Messy Studios holiday break news post! #1 (Patreon)

First off before we even begin, in case you might've missed it. Update 0.17 was released and you can download it >>Here<< (Android support has came early! ^^ We hope those who enjoy playing on the go, will enjoy that.)

So, in case you're new or might've missed our posts mentioning it over the past week or two. The Messy Studios team is taking a holiday break starting from now and we'll return back to our normal monthly game updates by Jan 8th! ^^ (This mean January won't have a new game release, next release won't be until Feb 5th.)

We hope everyone is enjoying Episode 3 and the events that it follows, we're right over the midway point in the common route now. (After episode 5, you'll go into a dedicated route for episodes 6-12.)

It's been a crazy long year, but I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that. Our team has made a lot of progress in 2020, below is a brief look back mentions of some goals we hit for the development.

~GUI assets~

Early in the year we had the gui created for the game and while we have shifted from tyranobuilder as our engine over to using Ren'py as our final decision on what feels right for the finished state of the game, once we move along. We'll end up having some new gui elements looked into being added with the next game update.

This is to offer some missing screens that we don't have art for right now.

~BG art~ (Olivson)

Sometime around Summer, we finished all the bg art being added to the game and while there was some plans early on to have weather changes seen or changes for club rooms and dorm rooms. (Personalized items seen or what not) It didn't feel like it was practical given we could've gave Miki her own personal room (morning/sunset/night), but do the same for the other 5 main girls or side girls and you have a lot of extra art images in the game that are used very little in the grand scheme.

~Sprite art~ (LisadiKaprio)

I believe around Spring or right before Summer, we managed to get the sprite art all done for characters. We no longer had placeholder sketches seen in the game or 3d placeholders. (Granted we did have some redesigns for some characters ranging from light to heavy.) Which we saw all the way up until recently.

But mainly we believe the sprite art is done, aside from possibly some light outfits and mainly what we'll see in 2021 is oc character requests tackled as the high priority, as a few of you have been waiting for quite some time and we haven't forgotten.

Lightly speaking on oc characters, we will add them to the game at some point along the way every couple of months. Our goal is to finish episodes 1-5 and then see where to make some light adjustments to fit some characters in during fitting moments. (Example: episode 2 when showing up to the pool to swim, we could lightly see a character here.)

~Engine/editing~ (Uncle Artie)

We're of course going to be having engine and editing work all the way up until the final days of MA's polishing sometime in early 2022.

But we hope that the engine/editing work so far seen more recently in the past 2-3 updates has been very good. I handled the engine work during the tyranobuilder versions (update 0.01 - 0.14) But I knew that by the end of this year, I'd need to have someone else take on the engine work as trying to write and do the engine work was becoming too stressful to fit in during a month. (Keep in mind many of us have our jobs outside of the project or school to deal with, personal time tossed in lightly.)

~Writing~ (Bridget aka myself)

We're going to have the writing continue much like the engine/editing stuff up to the final days needed.

I have no plans on stepping down as the writer and in case you weren't around a year ago. It was around this time last year when we were a few updates into the game. Uncle was actually the writer with myself directing scenes, but the direction things were heading at the time didn't match up with him and he stepped down to tackle editing.

I decided to take over as the writer and it's been a year since I've been doing it, some days are easier than others and while we have quite a year ahead of us for 2021. I'm excited to share with everyone where episode 4 takes us in events seen and characters we meet, along with how episode 5 will wrap up the common route and if it'll feel like you've had the proper time to make a real decision on which character's story to follow from there.

~Music~ (Fabled Ways)

Around mid Summer we hired on a producer to help create around 13-14 unique tracks for the game and we've fully paid all of that off last month. We hope you've been enjoying the game with the music on, but we also understand sometimes it can be distracting or grow tired of it.

We don't want to hype anyone up yet and we surely don't wish to jump right into things without keeping in mind our budgeting first, but as episode 4 & 5 wrap up. We'd like to get a feel if there seems to be some music that is lacking for the game in order to have some new tracks made.

(I believe some lighter more in the background easy on the ears music for daily slice of life stuff might be in order? :P )

~Moving on~

I can feel this being a bit of a long post, but let's try to move along from our look back and instead look at what we have planned for the future!
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When we return on Jan 8th to begin working again on MA, we'll kick things off with releasing a side story in Feb 5th. (I know, episode 4 would be ideal. Hear me out.) This side story is just something on the shorter side and sweet to ease us into 2021.

It'll be called "Miki's Dream" I don't want to give away or ruin too much right now, but I'll mention two things...

It involves dreaming and placing players in Miki's shoes. :P (Sorry, all I can say for now!)

Now, the reason we're doing this instead of releasing episode 4 is because it'll let us ease back into our normal monthly schedule of development without trying to stress out completely and falling flat on our faces when we head into 2021.

It'll hopefully give me enough time to focus on having Episode 4 done for March 8th.

-Miki's Dream (side story) ~ Released Feb 5th.
-Episode 4 (main game) ~ Released March 8th.
-Episode 5 (main game) ~ Released April 6th.

Things will be looking like that for our release schedule in the first quarter of 2021, I know it's a bit of a wait, but with the size of our episodes. MA really does offer pretty big updates in terms of writing and hopefully cg art being on track by Feb. (Another reason we're doing this.) [This isn't us bragging, it's just that some indie games offer much less per month. Every project & team is different in what they offer, we try to offer the most that we can during a month of work.]
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With that out of the way, I'd like to try wrapping this post up. <.< I'd like to first off mention that even though we've released Episode 3 for Dec and have no planned release for Jan. We will still be doing general news posts, behind the scenes, art previews and much more.

One thing we have in store for this month as something fun to kick off the end of the year. We'll be doing a holidays themed wallpaper made by our cg artist, we'll have a voting poll to ask about a few ideas and just which character should be the cover girl for the wallpaper. (Said wallpaper will be given out for download to supporters as our thanks to all of you in various sizes to fit your desktops.)

We'll try to make sure there's still fun and exciting stuff to gain from supporting us for the rest of this month and mainly during Jan, before we get on track.

It's really odd to think that Update 0.17 is our last game update for 2020, just from a development side of things. We'll see 2021 as our year of trying to polish the game up as we've been seeing with Episodes 1-3 so far and for those who are worried with the lack of dialogue choices. We're going to be looking over these episodes and finding fitting ways to keep choices being fun and what they offer in return.

With that, I believe this  is a good spot to wrap up our news post for this month for now. All of us on the team are looking forward to our time off during the holidays and not having to stress about MA, as we don't wish to rush things out. I can't speak for everyone on the team, but I myself, will be trying to do a little catching up on some anime series and games that I've had set aside for a few months to return to. :P

So, from all of us on the Messy Studios team.
We're very thankful for your support during 2020 and continued support into 2021!
We wish you all a Happy Holidays! <3