September Development Report! (Patreon)

Development Report time!

Starting us off, September marks our anniversary for when the project first started back in 2019, a whole 3 years ago! It's crazy to think how much time has passed by since then and what has changed along the way.. <.< We normally do a anniversary post every year around this time and so I'd like to give the heads up that we're still doing that, but for this year it'll be later this month.

The anniversary post itself will also be a bit different in what approach we take with it. For example.. Our first year post was focused on a huge Q&A between Artie and myself going back and forth, mainly discussing the early days of development that led up to before we rebooted things. I believe it was mostly talking about what plans we had back when the game was using a chapter to chapter system. That post also includes a few old builds that fans can download and enjoy checking out for free, to see just how far we've came in development compared to these days.

The second year anniversary post was a huge collection of going over each month dating back from right around our first reboot in January 2020, all the way to what we did along the way until Fall of 2021. So that includes the old Tyranobuilder engine version of the game talks, along with the Ren'py engine swap we did, etc. There was also a Q&A section to have select questions for the team related to what they do that were asked, along with general questions from fans/supporters.

Overall, you get the idea.. ^^" If you're interested in checking those posts out, you can do so at the links below or in our guide post.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/1-year-post-out-41290599
https://www.patreon.com/posts/2nd-year-post-q-55907006

Considering we don't want to repeat the same old thing we've done last year for the anniversary posts. We'll be doing something a bit different to celebrate the milestone, but it should still be really exciting and fun to check out later this month! ^^

Wrapping up the intro section.. Last month, I was sick with covid for the 2nd time early on and made it through that. Along with that, I officially decided to take the next step in my life. I officially quit my day job that was with for nearly 4 years in order to begin doing college in place of a job. It's something I wanted to do back in late 2020 before covid popped up and things were still very up in the air regarding it altogether.

The main thing to highlight, is that while I'll be focusing on college. I will also be working on the project still. I have a schedule for how to handle that while giving myself enough personal time included, mainly the weekends being free of anything to worry about.

~September Dev plans!~

Now with getting the next update out, I did say we'd shoot for getting that out in August. But I'll fully admit, that with what I had going on in the month personally.. It kind of hurt things a bit and just having my mind in four different directions while trying to sort out things for myself, even now a little bit still.. ^^"

But I now have a good chuck of extra time for the time being this month before I begin officially starting my college. I plan on making the most of that time into the project getting off the ground again and soaring along!

Ideally what we'll see, is a shorter wait time between the update releases after v0.20 as well. It might even be pretty shocking how quickly v0.21 comes along and what follows that.

~Development Team!~

[~CG art~]

August was a bit of a slower month in cg art, mainly MarxeDP was on vacation for most of the month. But towards the end of the month, I started to see some early sketches for the next cg scene in progress!

Ideally, this month will showcase some cg art related to Rachel's route and we also have cg art paid for that's related to Juliet's route. On top of that, we also had a supporter do our $275 tier again! ^^ So we'll be adding that to the list of cg art being tackled for this month into October. :P

July  was a big month behind the scenes for MarxeDP and AjoseMP, along with  the help from Bandyrash. They finished up 2 cg scenes, one being from  the $200-275 support tier and the other being related to Miki's route!

We'll have some concept art for Rachel's stuff posted in a few days!

[~Sprite art~]

Last month was pretty neat for sprite stuff! We showed off Juliet and Rachel additions coming to the game, but besides those and what we'll be seeing in previews for this month! Behind the scenes, we had some minor adjustment additions related to sprite stuff that'll be fun to highlight in a post here this month.

Along with that, we'll have some Charlotte addition preview stuff to showcase this month as well! Then lastly.. This one might not show up officially until late September or early October.. But we've started working on the Kickstarter oc's remaining again! So one of those are making amazing progress so far!

If you missed our sprite related previews in August, you can check those out below!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/sprite-preview-70438262 (Juliet additions)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/sprite-preview-70853892 (Rachel additions)

[~Music~]

We're still working on the romance track, but we're hoping to wrap that one up here soon this month and get the next track worked on! ^^" The next track after that will most likely be Juliet's theme!

[~Gui~]

We'll have to wait and see regarding this, but I have heard from ds-sans and they're okay with the plan of at least providing one new gui related screen or asset per month until we're finished with that. ^^

So.. With some luck, we'll possibly see something related to this posted on here this month!

~Ending Notes~

Aaaand that does it for this post! The next time we have our post in October, it'll be a bit more exciting by then if we have everything out to both the public and supporters for some content to check out, expect a good bit of voting polls to return and other stuff we haven't seen in quite a while!

I should've added this mention above somewhere.. But when we release v0.20, we're toying with the idea of offering about 2 scenes out of 9 total that's in episode 5 as part of the public free content offered for MA, the full episode would be for supporters until our next following release being v0.21. (Those who supported us at $5 or more during 2021 or 2022 will receive v0.20 for free as well!)

We hope that by offering that small bit of episode 5 to the public fans, it'll be met well by supporters and fans alike. ^^" We normally don't do that sort of thing, but with how long it's been for everyone for new content and considering v0.19.5 is more of a HD improvement overhaul of the game assets, quality update. We'd feel better by at least giving our public fans a tiny glimpse of what they can expect if they choose to wait until v0.21 releases for supporters.

(So just to make that easier to understand.. ^^" )

V0.20 (episode 5) releases for supporters exclusively, same time as that, V0.19.5 (HD quality + small demo of episode 5) releases for public fans.

V0.21 (episode 6) releases for supporters exclusively, same time as that, V0.20 (full episode 5) releases for public fans.

Hopefully that clears up any confusion. :P

As some brief personal life mentions.. As I already highlighted about my day job and college. Last month felt like I was being pulled in all different directions all at once.. ^^" Things are a bit more easygoing for now thankfully, but I'd like to focus much of my energy and time in the project while I have the extra time this month to fully do so!

~ From all of us at Messy Studios! ~