July news post #2 (Patreon)

It's about that time for some updates and general news regarding stuff! :P

I'd like to first start us off with a mention about the Summer Wallpaper voting polls. If you were around last month, we began hosting our first voting poll regarding our bonus wallpapers we've been doing since December.

This post here >> https://www.patreon.com/posts/summer-wallpaper-52719831

Well, since it's been quiet about this and normally we have follow up voting polls related to it after figuring out which character/s will be featured. I'd like to let everyone know that the winners of that voting poll are still set in place for a Summer themed wallpaper.

As of right now with how much funding is going into episode 5's development. I want to hold off just a little longer on the Summer wallpaper being done as of right now we have 4 completed cg scenes out of 7 planned for ep 5, just from naturally what events take place during the episode.

So I think many of you will agree it'd be best if we push our Summer bonus wallpaper thing back just a little bit and make sure we focus the funding we have right now towards the big episode 5. I know it'll probably be around late August by the time we see the Summer wallpaper by the looks of it... <.< (So much for being within "Summer") But it is what it is.

With that said...

We have plans for some bonus content to possibly tackle outside of our normal development time on the main MA stuff. Our 2nd anniversary since we started development on MA is coming up in September and we'd like to do a similar post like we did last year, here >>https://www.patreon.com/posts/1-year-post-out-41290599

But we want to include a fun little bonus to celebrate our 2nd year, but we're also well aware that we have a good amount on our plate for our schedule to stay on track. So take it with a grain of salt, but we do want to have a little bonus fun thing included in our post to celebrate. It's just making sure we can put some time outside of our normal dev time towards it and if it would be a good call or not. (When I say time outside of dev time, I mean extra personal free time during weekends when I normally take some time off from my day job and MA in general.)

~Moving on~

So that about covers some news on the Summer wallpaper and what's going on regarding that, along with our 2nd anniversary plans.

Episode 5 development is still moving along pretty well, in case you missed our previous news post. The reason v0.20 is targeted for mid August after the mention during June that episode 5 is further along and shouldn't take too long after v0.19 released is two things.

(1) - Behind the scenes for writing, things happen to change from early draft ideas to the final ideas laid out. Originally episode 5 was going to contain roughly 4-5 events similar to how episode 4 felt, but along the way when trying to make a solid connection between episode 4 into episode 5. I decided to include some stuff to episode 4 at the last moment to build up the idea that episode 5 is focusing much more on joining a club, instead of episode 5 having some club events seen but not really giving it a solid theme overall for the episode.

So simply put, episode 5 went from having 4-5 events up to 9 events that play out. It should feel like by the end of episode 5 that it not only is the biggest episode in length to date, but also that it really drives home the idea and tone that your choice coming up through the episode will impact the rest of the game for yourself.

(2) - The second thing is that our original plan was to have episode 5 release as v0.20 and then v0.21 would be considered a smaller update focused around adding quality of life stuff for the game, mainly fixing some minor stuff in ep 1-4, some new choices/interactive moments, new art variants added, bg and oc characters being seen, etc.

Well it started to make more sense to me to just include that into v0.20 with episode 5 since episode 5 would be considered the end of the common route for the game. It would be ideal to have all the new changes made to ep 1-4 at the same time for those new or those looking to replay from the start to check out the new stuff and also refresh themselves on how the game plays out before making their choices.


So you can probably get a rough idea why we'd change things around a bit for the targeted release.. <.< But with that said, we're still aware that some of you might be on the fence with how long it took v0.19 to release. We're not looking to see a repeat of that ever again and I know each week passing right now will begin to make things feel unsettling, but the amount of content in v0.20 is easily about 2-3 hours vs the normal 1 hour of new content. (Based roughly on average reading times of word counts and new art/choices, etc.)

My hope is that with the release of v0.20 around in mid August, it'll still feel reasonable to many and from there our focus for releases will be set around the route episodes, giving us a bit more of an average set goal once again of releasing new content within every 35-40 days just about.

As of right now, episode 5 is coming along on track to our schedule planned. Our focus is purely episode 5 right now until it's fully polished and ready before we even begin touching ep 1-4 for the quality of life related content.

~Conclusion~

I think that just about sums up our news post! I wanted to mainly bring up what was going on with the Summer wallpaper and let everyone know it hasn't been forgotten about. Some news on our anniversary stuff and of course mainly how episode 5 stuff is going along so far being on track still.

Later this week, we'll see the 4th cg previews for episode 5. Some final sprite creator tool previews of some bg characters being seen soon. Some more behind the scenes writing to follow suit this week, among some other surprises for stuff coming. :P

So with that said, from all of us at Messy Studios!
Thank you and we hope you're excited for what's to come!