April 2024 Progress Report (Patreon)

Hey everyone.

It’s funny how quickly plans change in real time. Today I was intending to drop our first grand update on our new development schedule, but in the first week of March Dev and I finally got the good news we’ve been waiting for almost two years for. We finally got the immigration visa for him to live in the United States with me. Naturally, this meant we’ve had to spend a ton of time this month prepping for the international move. By next weekend, Dev will officially be a permanent resident here in the States!

On the negative side, the preparations (housework, paperwork, packing luggage, shipping luggage, saying goodbye to family, etc,.) drastically cut into the time we had to work on the build. While Dev has already told you about his plans for the art, I can say that my plans for the writing were mostly smashed, hehehe…

My goal was to push Carlos’s route through to the end, but I only managed to barely finish the first of his expected five remaining days. Alas, there’s only so much you can do when real life comes knocking.

On the plus side, I managed to finish coding the gallery and chapter select reworks. Anyone who’s familiar with how Ren’py functions knows that trying to do anything with the UI is like trying to balance across a tightrope over the Grand Canyon. Change one little line of code in one place, all of a sudden the code in all sorts of unexpected areas stops functioning. As such, through repeated trial and error I settled on a mostly utilitarian final structure to how the revamped pages are presented. Perhaps someday Dev and I will switch to a more flexible engine, but for now since we’re at the 75% mark for SL we’re going to see this through to the end in Ren’py.

Now that Dev is living with me, my hope is that the workflow will streamline, especially since we won’t have to worry about long distance communication anymore. It’s certainly a relief knowing that this long chapter in our lives is finally coming to a close.

Thank you all for being patient with us. You’re the best!

~Dzahn

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Hey guys, Dev here,

Well, you probably already know the update we were planning on releasing today ended up being delayed to next month (and it’s unfortunately not an April Fool’s). Both him and I worked really hard on Santa Lucia and our other projects during these past two months… but our schedule coincided with the most important thing I’ve done so far in my life: moving across the Atlantic Ocean to live in the USA! After two grueling long years of visa-related shenanigans, I’ve finally obtained my US visa, and moving in with Dzahn for good. It’s been pretty stressful to prepare, but by the end of this week I’ll no longer be living in France, hehe.

As such, I’m sure you can understand why working on this update has been pretty tough, in the middle of the preparations for the move. We felt like rushing the build out would lead to a lesser overall quality, and I didn’t want to compromise what I’m working on just for the sake of getting it out. I hope this report makes up for it, even a tiny bit.

Anyway, what I have been up to since the last build? I’ve actually been redoing massive parts of the UI, in an effort of freshening up the game and bring in things I’ve learned over the past four years to help make the user experience (especially in the gallery menu) a bit more tolerable. I actually drew three entire new ‘backgrounds’ for the gallery buttons, and tried to cram as much details as I could about the related characters. I wonder if you can figure out which item belongs to whom?
I’ve also been working on a brand new main menu, trying to keep close to what I like about the original while adding more to it, and it should be done by the time the build drops.
What else? I’m still working on the itch.io page redesign, which I keep getting stalled on due to overly ambitious ideas, but I think it’s slowly coming together. While not directly related to the build, since I’m the only artist on board (minus Drake for the short story), it’s pretty hard to split my attention on everything, not even including Homecoming. I do have a nifty thumbnail design featuring Ben, Zach and Russell I think you guys might like.

I’ve also been working on Nate’s sprite rework, which should mark the final character to have his sprite redesigned among the main cast (as well as adding new expressions for him). There’s a few more in the side cast that could use a face lift, but that can wait.

Once I’m all situated in the USA, we’ll make a new poll regarding short stories, where higher tier patrons guys can vote on which side story they’d like to see happen. I’m thinking of splitting it into two polls, one SFW and one NSFW, for a total of two short stories, as I have a feeling an NSFW idea might crush any other SFW ideas, hehe.

In any case… I can’t thank you guys enough for supporting us and letting us do this schedule change. It’s been a huge boon for my productivity, and doing this move while on the old monthly schedule would have probably annihilated me.

I’ll see you real soon,

Cheers,

Dev