July news post #1 (Public) (Patreon)

Well, now that v0.18 is out to the public and v0.19 is out to supporters. I think it's about time to toss out our first news post for the month and try giving you all a good idea of our plans ahead for the month leading to our next release!

And no, don't worry. We're not looking to beat our record for how long it took for those two versions to release. :P I'll mainly be focusing our talks here today on v0.20 in mind.

So without rambling on about our past, it'd be best if we move on ahead as we're focused on proving ourselves to deliver on some nice content coming soon. Let's jump right into it!

~What's the plan?~

Before we begin talking about our July/August schedule, let's focus on one other thing to mention first.

I've recently been chatting with someone about our gui overhaul for the game and by the sounds of it. We should be able to get the new gui stuff started in August, since that's when they'll be free to begin working on it.

We're pretty excited for this, since this is our last major new thing being added to MA for 2021 on our to do list. Not to confuse anyone by that, we still have plenty of monthly to monthly new cg scenes and what we consider monthly on-going content needed done for MA for releases. It's just that this gui overhaul would be a big one time thing, get it into the engine and working, then it's finished for that aspect. :P

The overhaul will be the polished up, ideal and finished gui look for the game to match the theme of MA a bit better. There's a good amount of features for options we'd like to tackle with it, but it might be a tiny bit bumpy at first when we do have it added.

One thing that I am fearful of with the gui overhaul though, is that it might be possible... That since it's changing and removing old gui elements for new ones. That when we add the new gui overhaul into the game for a release, you might have to start a new game and skip through in order to make a new working save file/data. Since I assume your old data would be corrupted or not function right, depending on our testing for this, we might just add a save slot that at least jumps to the start of ep 5 at the time.

Anyways, I would go further into detail about the gui overhaul outside of the above. But we don't really have too much else to share with it right now. We're thinking it'd be possibly ready to be added in game by September/October roughly.

Moving on...

~What can we expect for v0.20 content?~

[Keep in mind, the information below can and will change during our dev process.]

~New content~

-Episode 5 added.
-New music added to episode 5.
-4+ cg scenes added to episode 5.
-Special Episode 5 splash art for choosing a girl. (gui)

-Quality of Life changes added.
^-[OC bg characters added to ep 1-5]
^-[Minor grammar fixes, light dialogue/text adjustments]
^-[New choices/variables added to ep 1-5]
^-[Bg character sprites added to ep 1-5]
^-[New variants for existing cg art added to ep 1-3]

~When can we expect v0.20 to release?~

Keep in mind this is purely a rough guess based on our schedule and how much writing is done roughly each week from now until then.

We're thinking somewhere around the end of July or early August possibly. I do have a good bit of progress written for episode 5's script behind the scenes, but I'll be honest. It's going to be our biggest episode yet considering the word count for it, because of what events are taking place and it's also seen as the finale of the common route leading into character route episodes following it.

I'll go over more details below on episode 5, but first I'd like to explain why we're pushing episode 5's release for the rough end of July or early August time frame, instead of releasing it sooner.

Our original plan for July at first was going to be releasing episode 5 as it's own release, followed by about a week or two later the quality of life update, followed by our first look at the route episodes.

As you can probably tell, it's a bit chaotic and more so when considering the whiplash effect that sort of plan would have on myself and Uncle Artie handling editing/engine work. Because for example I'd have episode 5 done, move it onto Uncle for 5-7 days to edit/engine focus on that, while he's doing that. I'm focusing on quality of life changes before he's finished with ep 5. Once ep 5 is ready, I'd pass off the quality of life changes to him to double check for edits/fixes and engine process, as I jump ahead to get going on route episodes, etc.

While that might not seem that bad to some, I think while many of you are still a bit wary with how episode 4's release took so long. But we're thinking it'd be best to have everything we want done and ready to release in one update coming up, rather than 3 different split updates.

Now with that said, I won't even try to guess the exact confirmed date for v0.20 since it'd be too hard to put a good confirmed guess on which day it'd be fully ready this far out. We'll of course have two other news posts this month that'll keep everyone informed as we get closer to our rough estimate release period to mention what date we fully expect exactly for v0.20

With how much content is planned for ep 5, it'll be at least 2-3 hours worth of content to read through, stuff to check out from previous episodes that's new, etc. Just one last thing to mention, v0.20 is supposed to be seen as making it so that what you all experience during that release for episode 1-5, is about 95% finished/polished up and won't need to go back and touch anything else those these episodes.

It's the ideal timing to make sure new players coming along for the first time see the ideal experience of the common route episodes and judging if MA is the right kind of experience for them before investing further time into it.

With that said, let's move on to episode 5 stuff more in detail! :P
 
~Episode 5: Is there a Mystery Club?~

This is our official subtitle for the episode! I'm sure those of you who have finished episode 4 are already well aware of what episode 5 seems to be focused around, but without major spoilers, we'll mention some light stuff about episode 5 below.

I think episode 4 did a pretty good job at tying up some loose ends for characters that we hadn't seen in a while, as well as setting up stuff for the future with other characters.

Rachel's little werewolf mystery arc seems to be wrapped up, but still a little mystery there as to what might come out from it in the future. But for now, Brandon has decided to just move on and put it behind them, hoping to just be friends with her as he first promised when they met.

Nova's awkward kiss made things uhh, well... Awkward for the two since the end of ep 2. We got a little hint of this in ep 3 when bumping into her at the nurse's office that the two haven't really talked since then, not sure how to move on from it and so with ep 4. It was nice to see not only Nova having a fitting moment of butting heads with Heather slightly, but the two managed to move past the awkwardness from the looks of it.

There's still plenty of other things that pops to mind though.

(How will Joey react to meeting Zoey? What or where does things go from here with her and Nathan? Will Brandon be expected to fill in as the babysitter for Zoey in the near future?)

(While it was nice to give Heather a taste of her own medicine, I'm afraid to see what will happen the next time Brandon bumps into her. Will Nova be around to save him or will someone else come along who stands a chance against someone like her?)

(What about the clubs? Just what clubs will Brandon and possibly his buddies check out soon? What sort of silly events will they find themselves in, or possibly...? Sexual frustrating events?)

There still seems to be a good bit of exposure coming up for many characters by the looks of things. With one character that we haven't quite fully been introduced to yet and much more to learn about Bridget... I think by the end of episode 5, many will have a very good idea of the cast of characters. :P

~Conclusion~

Whew... Okay, sorry for the wall of text everyone! I wanted to fully lay everything out there for our plans coming up.

I'll leave it pretty short here, I hope you all are enjoying Miki's Dream for those of you following along from the public side of things, while supporters are enjoying episode 4.

I'm happy and feel relieved to have v0.19 released, but I know I can't rest too much either as there's still plenty to get done. We should be seeing some behind the scenes for writing on episode 5 here pretty soonish, along with some concept art previews for one of our upcoming ep 5 scenes.

We're still going to be hosting our bonus wallpaper voting polls for the Summer themed wallpaper this month as well. We know that Erika and Heather are the winners, but it might be including Miki in there too.

Lisa (Our sprite artist) should be wrapping up work on our creator character tool and moving onto some KS oc's here soon during July. While MarxeDP (CG artist) will focus on ep 5 scenes needed.

With that said! From all of us at Messy Studios!
We hope your Summer is going well and looking forward to more from us soon!