v0.8.0 delay (Patreon)

Join me in this sad tale of first-world problems.

I've been having internet problems for a while now but nothing serious, random disconnection here, speed drop there, all very casual.

This last week has been a nightmare: I started waking up one day only having access to Google and Youtube, the rest of the sites were not working. I had to start doing some research. I discovered that the mini-switch I have was giving me problems and apparently it was not resolving the page names correctly and was making my internet go crazy. I replaced it and.... it was half solved.

I've been most of the week unable to access Patreon, Itch, Gmail, or just doing a Google search was making my internet go to shit.

I finally decided to start changing some cables and it seems to have solved a lot of problems but not all of them. As usual, my ISP says it's not their problem and that it's possible that the router is "old" (~4 years) so it's possible that it's starting to malfunction. They offered me a replacement but they wanted to charge me for it so I declined to buy one from Amazon. Worst experience of my life... Today I've been all morning at the post office because I have processed the refund. After a whole day trying to get it to work I gave up and did some research. Apparently, the router has compatibility problems with my ISP if I want to use it as the main router and not as a bridge... F*ck my life.

I'm not giving up because the current router needs a retirement so I'm still looking for routers but this time I'm not going to search for top brands and I'm going to try to make sure it's compatible with my ISP.

It's frustrating because in my previous job these kinds of configurations were my day-to-day life but in offices.

It seems that now everything is working more or less fine but I'm quite frustrated and pissed off that I have to be more focused and worried about my internet problems than focused on my work...

That said, I have to explain exactly why v0.8.0 is not released:

After finishing it I started working on the next step: redo/check the intro + first hours of gameplay both in terms of renders and dialogues. After thinking about it carefully I decided to delay the public version to publish the v0.8.5 which includes all the content of v8.0 + the new intro and all the revisions of the first hours.

You may be wondering why this odd decision, you don't care (or maybe yes) about the new intro or the dialogs revision, you want to play the new endgame. I know, but the first hours of gameplay are quite questionable on a plot/grammatical level and I can't delay it any longer. That revision was planned for v0.3.0 and we're already on 8.0... I can't delay it any longer.

I'm very interested in LA as a whole to have the same level always, whether it's the quality of the renders, dialogues, features... I'm always improving and learning new things to improve all aspects of LA (whoever played the first versions will have seen the big changes since then).

My intention is that someone who plays LA for the first time doesn't get the wrong idea of the game, a bad impression, or lose interest in the first minutes of the game because it seems boring. My intention is to make you interested in the story of LA from the very beginning of the game and try to make it always entertaining and dynamic while you play (obviously there are moments of long texts because there are long explanations necessary for the plot).

That's the main reason why I've delayed the public version. I know it was going to be risky but to my mind, it's necessary because I never felt good leaving the intro so cringe and questionable (for me) for so long, it was time to do an almost complete overhaul.

So complete that now the first minutes of the game will be Patricia waking you up and not the "show" between me and Lisapi.

It will be Patricia who will make you choose your name

You will choose your profession with Patricia's help.

There will be a moment when you will have freedom.

There will be spicy things that I can't show here (on my Discord channel I've been showing things for a while) among other little details like being able to go to the forest to collect wood (a new feature included in 8.0) to earn money and stats voluntarily during that "free" day.

The general dialogues of the introduction have changed a lot, everything that happens at the beginning with Vanessa is much more summarized (although the plot is still the same), I've erased a lot of redundant dialogues, etc. Maria's talks are still the same but they are better argued and a lot of cringe dialogue by the MC has been erased. Mostly I've focused on removing everything I considered cringe like when you meet Glenda or Anna (how the f*ck are you going to tell a girl you just met that you're her future boyfriend or that you've kidnapped her? What the f*ck I thought? That was going to be "lmao joke 10/10"? Damn...

Anyway... v0.8.5 release date: Next weekend.

This week there will be 2 EA for Patreon: 1 for Champions/Kings and after a few days there will be another one for the rest of the tiers.

Between Friday and Saturday, next week should finally be the public version.

As a farewell, I will leave my apologies for all this. I am the first one who is pretty pissed off with everything that has happened and quite overwhelmed by the frustration that all this is causing me. I am really sorry for everything that has happened and especially for the delay of the public version. It's something that shouldn't be something usual because it's not the way I work, but sometimes unexpected problems can arise...

See you next week with the public version.