0.6 Development Update 54 (Patreon)

Hey, folks!

We're very happy to finally announce the project we've been trying to get going since the beginning of this year. The dream you folks voted on all the way back in November is coming, and it's coming as a little standalone game - Riften U Sorority Party!

Don't worry, the name is just a working title for now. As is most of the game, to be honest. We've been planning on doing it as an in-game dream at first, but then the Valentine Vixens artbook came out and most folks loved it, so I was like "hey, let's do a 2D-dream". Less stress on our 3D production team, and a new experience for all you folks. And then we realised that it looked very out of place within AHITR, so it became a separate game. We slowly started working on it, but then there was the second artbook, the big tech update for the main game, new people joining the team, and I was hesitant to even announce this thing since we didn't know when it would be done.

But as of right now the work is going steady, the concepts are all done, the sprites are being drawn, the storyline is being refined, and we are very close to starting on the animations. I won't be showing off everything straight away to keep a stash of goodies for future development updates. So here are two of the WIP sketches for Cait, and you'll be seeing the rest of the cast later.

The game will be a branching visual novel, similar to the Halloween dream, but with slightly less deaths and more dialogue. We are also planning on adding voice overs for animations and time permitting, for at least some of the dialogue. We are targeting November for the first release, and the game will be available right here on this very Patreon. Hope you folks are excited for it, and please share your thoughts in the comments! We need your feedback to adjust our plans.

v0.6.16

v0.6.16 is in Alpha right now, and Beta should be coming next week. The new Lost and Found event is quite fun, and Cait gets to ask a few questions in her story event. The answers, though... Let's just say her story isn't done yet.

For Beta we'll hopefully finish the new Yona event. Well, technically, two of those. You'll finally get to see another side of her character, so stay tuned for that. The new hangouts for Blair and Lyriel are almost done, and if everything goes well, we'll have a new activity-tracking Quest Log entries done in time for Beta.

The Activity Quests will list all the activities where you haven't seen all the available scenarios, and will list the requirements to unlock new scenarios where applicable. You won't have to wonder if you missed some activity option now, and you won't have to try the activities over and over again to see if a new scenario is available. Those quests will require a fair bit of manual matching, though, and I'm still the sole code monkey on the project, so the first iteration might not be exhaustive.

Other stuff

We've started working on 0.7.0, but we're still in the planning stages. The team's performance is improving, we're still chipping away at bottlenecks, but there will come a day when we'll have a full update ready a few days before the Alpha release. Not this month, though.

We finished the first of the Casting Couch series last week on Twitter. You can get all the pics here, but for the accompanying text you'll have to go to the ex-bird website. The response has been very positive, so we'll be doing this again some time, along with the turntable-slash-strip-game.

In case you missed it, we've launched an Art Contest and a fair number of artists already expressed their interest. No submissions I can share with you yet, but we've been making character and outfit references for artists, and now we have a series of neat pics. You can see all of them over on Discord.

Oh! And thanks to the generosity of the server boosters, we now have a vanity link! discord.gg/ahitr is ours! We'll be converting the server to the "community" type and adding stickers and other cool stuff soon. Promise!

And hey, while we're at it, let's have a random poll just for fun. From the three Riften U designs, which outfit is your favourite so far? Vote away!

And see you soon!