Development Update 40 (Patreon)

Hey guys,

I hope everyone enjoyed the last update. As some people might still be playing through I will avoid spoilers for now.

Firstly, I'd like to apologise to people who had issues downloading from Mega and Google drive. The game is getting to a certain size now where our usual download sites are struggling. For those who have trouble with the Mega download limits, getting the free Mega app will prevent you from losing download progress if it stalls. For those that want to use the Gdrive link then I recommend logging into a free google account. As a longer-term solution to the downloads issue, I am looking at Patreon integration with Itch.io. In theory, it's possible to make a download link there that only people on a certain patron tier can access. This will also have the added advantage of stopping people from leaking the links and slowing down everyone else's downloads. I am still figuring this out but I will make sure to have a solution sorted in time for the next Patreon-only release.

Another issue I'd like to address is the complaints of some people about crashing to desktop when playing animations. As this only affects a relatively small number of windows computers, I believe it's an issue with some graphics drivers. As a short-term fix, disabling hardware acceleration seemed to help most of those affected (see the guide here on how to do this). As a longer-term solution, I am looking to upgrade to the latest version of the games engine (Renpy). We tried to do this with the last update, however, it created a lot of random bugs and we didn't have the time to fix them all before the release. We are working on it now though for version 0.14.

In the 13.2 version, Maxine paid a visit to the headmaster with a request for the school’s owners (to set up another in-character poll).

Those of you who have played the 0.13.2 version will have hopefully seen a little teaser scene with Maxine setting up for another in-character poll, similar to the one I had for Ada a few months ago. Maxine's teaser scene wasn't in the beta version so a lot of people in the teacher tier may not have seen it. For those that didn't, Maxine came to the headmaster's office and asked if the school's owners would be willing to donate to save the endangered naked mole rat (the real naked mole rat is not endangered by the way, in case anyone is worried about them). She said she wanted to organise a charity fundraiser and the headmaster suggested that she let the school's owners decide on the nature of the fundraiser. That's what people were allowed to vote on in the poll. I've attached a PDF to this post with the text and previews of the poll for those that would like to know what's going on. I can now formally announce the winner, which was the sponsored outfits option. I am already working on this and will post a photo set to the teacher and above tier sometime next week. Everyone else will get to see the fundraiser event in the next update.

A preview of how Maxine’s fundraiser might look. She is shown here wearing nothing but a skin-coloured transparent body stocking. Things will get a lot more embarrassing for her than this over the course of a week-long fundraising event.

Something else that was in the 0.13.2 version but not in the beta was some previews from the staff training sessions. I'll add them here for those who missed them.

In the 13.2 version, we added a coming soon screen to the staff training sessions, as well as unlocking Debbie’s Halloween to the event log.

As you can see we are a fair way along with the next update already. To explain exactly how far along we are, it would be helpful to explain a little about my creative process. I don't write the final script and then add images. I first write an outline of what's going to happen in each of the update's storylines and draft some of the key dialogue. Then I set out the main scenes in the graphics software to see how things look and work out if I need new environments, characters, outfits etc. With an image of the scenes clear in my mind, I'll then write all the dialogue in more detail. I may go backwards and forward between writing and the graphics software several times until I am happy with the scenes. I call this part of the process storyboarding. Most of the image previews I send out early in the development cycle are from this storyboarding process, which is why sometimes the previews differ slightly from the final versions.

Once I am happy with the script I start to capture all the final renders and animations and begin to code them into the actual game. As I do this, I'll edit the script, fill in any gaps in the dialogue and link everything together with the quest log. By the time I reach this final rendering stage, I will hazard a guess at how long it's going to take to put everything together and I'll set an estimated release date. Sometimes the scenes take a lot longer to make than I anticipated, or I will end up needing some extra scenes to tie everything together. Therefore by the time the deadline rolls around, there may be several scenes which I had storyboarded that end up being cut and rolling on the next update which is what happened here.

So where am I with this process for the staff training storyline? I have the bulk of the writing and storyboarding done. I would say I am nearly at the final rendering stage already. However, I had a couple of possible endings to the storyline in mind, and I need to decide between them and write the actual dialogue. So I'd like at least a couple of weeks to do the remaining writing and then maybe around four weeks to capture all the final renders and animations. On top of that, I need some time to write some dialogue and capture the images for Maxine's charity fundraiser poll. Plus I always take a week or so between updates to keep on top of software developments and improve our animation and image quality. I would also like to get ahead of myself with Faye's storyline and punishment system (for version 0.15) by having the outline drawn up and setting some tasks for my team to be working on while I am busy writing and capturing renders.

Realistically, then we are looking at the next update coming sometime at the end of November or early December. There are some very big unknowns in there though, mainly related to the fact I haven't written the ending. It's very difficult to be creative with a deadline looming over you, so I am not going to set a release date just yet. With a significant amount of the work done already though, it shouldn't be too long.

On top of the staff training storyline, there are several other things I'd really like to include in the next update. However, I think I've finally learned my lesson about overpromising content and having to push things back. I am just going to say version 0.14 is going to be the staff training and Maxine's fundraiser. Everything else I manage to fit in will be a nice bonus for everyone.

Altos