Development News Update! (Mini) (Patreon)

I promised myself this would be a short and sweet little update, keeping a leash on myself and trying to be mindful to not over sell development stuff mentioned. ^^"

Episode 5 is our main priority for release content, we're not ready to toss a dart at the calendar with a set release date as of right now sadly. We really do want to hammer that announcement down, but we don't want to falsely announce anything too soon and then have to do the back pedaling of shame. >.<

What I can say for now will lightly confirm at least when we'd roughly expect a broader time frame for when episode 5 should be done without any doubts or sudden hiccups.

Rough release timeline!
August-September

I wish I could say more with that, but the idea is that without any doubt.. The longest we can expect to wait is sometime in September, this is probably more of a "Worse case scenario" honestly.. But it's there as a safety net in case any hiccups do pop up.

I'd like to mention a few brief things below for what our rough workflow is right now leading up to release. If it isn't mentioned below, assume that process is already finished. ^^

-Final editing pass. 25-30% done.
-Engine transfer. 30% done.
-New assets added/functioning correctly. 50% done.
-New feature/systems testing.
-General testing pass.
-Release.

A mini breakdown of the timeline above.. Editing pass and engine transfer are being done side by side, so we should see those finished together and that's the bulk of work needed to at least deliver something in general. This should move along pretty quickly though, but we had to do some behind the scenes stuff with engine related work recently that's slowed things down a bit. (I'll dive into that more in August, as it's too much to mention here.)

New assets is mainly the new sprite and cg art, what I mean by this is the new art style stuff. For the most part, we already have these assets in the engine and game generally working as we want them to. I've been adding the new sprite files for the existing characters to replace their current files in the game as of v0.19.5, which is mainly just getting the filenames for the new assets to match up with the existing asset files. (Sorry for my confusing wording. >.< ) CG art having a few new variants, we have to touch those in-game moment up and in some cases add some dialogue/text to those outcomes.

(The new style art for sprites and cg, mainly sprites is something we want to get done for v0.20 Ep 5 because it's less work for later to revisit and waste more time, if we simply tackle the characters existing in ep 1-5 and Miki's Dream now vs returning afterwards just to add Nathan and another character, then the visual difference between them, etc. ^^" It's not ideal.. But we do hope people understand from the development side why we're doing that now vs later.)

New features/systems testing is mainly our new light stuff coming to MA for quality features. One of these is the new addition of sprite animations, not exactly "animation" but if you've played other vn's before and seen character sprites lightly bounce or rush off screen before, etc. That's what we mean by those, trying to give more life to the game in the scenes. (Ideally I'd like to expand on this further with character's blinking and see how far we can go with this.) New transition effects are also being used to feel more fitting, but honestly these things aren't super major to wrap up when we test these further.

Beyond that, it's really just a quick testing phase of the new content, hammer out any last minute bugs that are typically visual stuff and we'll be ready for release phase! :P

That all said, I hope this gives a better idea of things. We'll also be sharing more of the written script stuff in August, I've been trying to carefully figure out how to go about that. (On one end, I want to show it all and on the other.. To say the least, ep 5 has some major story spoilers involved that I've been biting my tongue on showing too much. ^^" ) Just expect some stuff shared might be redacted in spots to keep some surprise for the actual game content upon playing.

Thank you for everyone being supportive and very patient with us! <3 We're trying not to let our excitement get the best of us, but as we inch closer and into August.. I'm sure it'll begin to really show in our posts planned out!

~ From all of us at Messy Studios! ~