July news post #3 (Patreon)

Well this month flew right by! Crazy how time is against you when you don't expect it. I guess we should cover some light stuff for our last news post for July before we head into August.. ^^" I hope everyone has been enjoying the previews and posts related to the upcoming ep 5 content so far, we'll be seeing more leading into August.

So let's jump into things!

~Episode 5 related news~

The episode writing is coming along pretty well on looks on schedule, there's still a few events to get through and double checking through the rough draft to fix up pacing and minor issues I see.

I will say that I'm a little worried about v0.20 release, only because I do want to have the quality of life content included along with it. Which includes ep 1-4 grammar fixes, minor adjustments, new choices/interactive moments, existing art receiving new variants/improvements, along with visuals for oc and normal bg students added.

So you can probably guess it might be a bit iffy based on that as to just how much time will be needed to tackle these things from a writing adjustment angle and consider what Uncle will need for time to get through it for the engine work mainly. I'm not assuming it to take majorly long given it's not like we're completely redoing ep 1-4 or anything dramatic like that.

I'm thinking at worse it'll need 2 weeks of focus for the quality of life stuff and if that does end up being the case, then we might see v0.20 move from roughly releasing around mid August to late August.

Now of course this might be the moment to freak out possibly for some, but I'm just trying to give rough time frames mainly. It could take until late August for v0.20 but as the weeks move forward and we keep everyone informed along the way, we'll be honest as to what we're feeling if we're ahead of that goal or if we'll need a little more time. That's probably the hardest part of development for us right now is giving a rough time frame for a release.

That isn't to say it'll stay that way though, once ep 5 is out. The rest of the game development moving forward is broken up on focusing on 3 girl's route episodes per month, as to how that'll work... Well once ep 5 is closer to release we'll host a voting poll to see how to fairly split the characters up into which monthly releases.

A example of this would be taking one really popular character (Nova), add a not as popular character (Rachel?) and then one of the side girls (Zoey?). That would be v0.21 targeted for late Sept/early Oct. Then we do the same layout again, popular character (Miki?), not so popular character (Heather?) and one side girl (Bridget?). That would be v0.22 and you get the pattern, but we want to ensure each release has a fair mix of not feeling like one release setup is very heavy on popular characters so that it isn't all hype one month and then waiting 2 more months for the big hype update again.


~Art related content~

With art focused on v0.20 there's a huuuge amount coming this update, it's no joke when we say this update will probably be our biggest amount of content at once.

Lisa (Our sprite artist) has been working on some secretive stuff back in Spring related to MA. Stuff that sadly I can't share previews for because of just how spoiler heavy the content is to the game's story, but once it comes into the story soon enough. We will try to be mindful on how we share some previews of this content without risking spoiling anyone along the way.

Of course as many of you might be aware, she's done the character creator tool recently and that's something very exciting, because we're going to make use of it for bg students visuals added for the game.

(Still discussing and figuring out about how to go about offering the tool for supporters as part of a tier reward possibly, as the idea right now seems to lean towards ensuring that the tool itself is part of Lisa's work and I want to be fair about things related to that. So if we offer the tool as part of a one time purchase on a support tier for say $15-20 to unlock it for good, a good chuck of that profit will be going to her on her monthly bonus payments.)

Aside from the creator tool, she has been now helping redesign Miki and Nova's diapers. The reason behind it being that I've always felt that the two had similar and not so outstanding looks for their designs. The main adjusting went into Miki's diaper design to move away from the hearts as a focal point and put more of a focal point towards her design based on magical girl themed. Nova's would embrace the heart theme but have some adjustments made to it as it felt like the idea of a lovey slightly girly design fits into her personality, least part of her personalty that seems to pop into the picture a good bit.

I am glad so far I haven't seen backlash for the design changes made as my goal was to make sure on first glance when looking at these new designs it didn't feel like massive shifts away from the original designs.

Lisa is working on a sporty casual outfit for Nova and we'll see previews for this leading into August. The next thing on the list being done is seeing Garnet's sprite, without big spoilers. She is the literature club leader and has a bit more screen time around within Erika's route as a support character related to the club. (Don't worry Miki is still around.)

One last note on Lisa's work is that we're opening up September to December for KS oc characters to really push on getting them done with the rest of the stuff out of our way now, trying to ensure we have those done by early 2022 for the KS crowd of supporters that helped us greatly, along with the continued monthly support on Patreon.

Moving on...

I was hoping to make contact with our old bg artist to have them return this Summer and help create a few new bg's needed that wouldn't take too much focus away and it'd be lower priority stuff similar to how we're handling funding for music right now.

But I tried reaching out to her in May and still nothing back from them. >.< Which is fine for right now, considering it isn't a massive priority and might be something to hold off on for a bit further since I'm thinking the gui overhaul costs will pop up here in August.

Aside from bad news...

MarxeDP (our cg artist) has been powering through a mix of fixing stuff up, new variants and new cg art coming soon.

There's some existing cg art that we found that had some very minor visual mistakes, stuff like in ep 3 for the wedgie scene, Heather's armband has the Japanese lettering seen while her other cg art in ep 4 doesn't show it. Erika's siding of her diaper print isn't seen when it should be for ep 3, etc. Just some minor over looked visuals to fix up, similar to how we had it pointed out to us that Juliet's diaper pattern/print in ep 2 didn't match up to the writing. (They forgot to add the floral/blue roses to her diaper.)

Outside of minor visual fixes, there's some new variants being added to existing art in ep 1-3 mainly. I think the biggest of these are for the wedgie scene in ep 3 and Rachel's scene in ep 2 displaying more expression changes to go along with the writing and give more life to these moments that have quite a bit going on. There are other variants though, so it'll be a nice timing to have all this stuff for v0.20 given ep 5 wraps up the common route of the game, making it a good time to play through ep 1-5 freshly is the goal if people wish to check the new quality stuff being added and refresh themselves on MA as a whole so far before routes.

I'll mention it related here with cg art, but as of right now we still have the idea set aside to possibly allow toggle on/off options for displaying wet, messy or gas related visuals. It's just that right now isn't the time yet for that to be looked into further, possibly set for the update in the near future where we add the new gui overhaul as it'd be much more fitting at that time to really sit down and discuss how it would work and if it's really "worth" it, as in if there's enough demand of people who would actually want to play MA by default with these settings to display stuff off.

Mainly right now, it seems easier said than done but the engine side of things and writing paths involved for such a system from what I can guess would look something like...

Episode 2 Rachel's cg scene, there is a default "path" which is how things work currently, all visuals are intact. No messy "path" so copy the writing there in the engine and make a new engine jump to re-route towards showing the cg scene to not have the messy visuals. No gas "path" so again, same thing as above. So far that's at least 3 "paths" just for one area of cg art in the story to consider, now I won't even get into the whole complex matter of "What if I toggle off messy and gas at the same time?" "What happens if I toggle one option on/off during a cg scene?" "What about sprite visuals displaying stuff or writing still displaying mentions?"

Pretty much, there's a lot more to consider than just saying "Yeah, let's go ahead and offer the option to turn this one visual on/off." :P

It could be that I'm making it sound more complex than it would be, but I'm just trying to help visualize that this is just for one scene/event area in episode 2. We're not even talking about how many extra "paths" would be needed for all the other moments cg related or not in MA to make this work.

Anyways, one last mention on cg art! Currently the artists are working on the 5th cg scene of 7 planned for episode 5. So in August we'll soon see some concept previews coming up and then a finished preview of it. I'm excited to see how everyone will react to the 5th cg scene as it's a pretty iconic moment from long ago from the earlier v0.14 builds that didn't have cg art for it, so seeing it come to life in this fashion should be exciting for fans of those certain characters displayed. :P

~Conclusion~

I think this is a good stopping point for our last news post this month. <.<

Mainly I wanted to tackle letting everyone be aware that v0.20's rough release time frame could possibly be looking to be late August, mainly because while things are on schedule for episode 5 writing wise. I can see the quality of life content possibly being more than a week of focused work to get it done and also trying to keep in mind that Uncle Artie needs a good week to put everything into the engine, plus our testing to ensure nothing is broken or majorly wrong to disrupt playing it.

There is the option to release episode 5 without the quality of life changes, but I'd rather not for this release just because of the timing and how connected everything would feel with the quality stuff added. The idea is that v0.20 as a whole is wrapping up the common route of the game. So it makes sense to us that we'd want the whole experience to feel about 95% finished, what you see in v0.20 for ep 1-5 should be pretty much what you'd see with the finished version of the game after development is done with the game over all.

Anyways! I think I've rambled on long enough... ^^" If you've made it this far, thank you for sticking with my text wall! :P

With that said, from all of us at Messy Studios!
We hope to see you all in our next news post early in August!