ViM Studios: Dev Log 09-Jun-2023 (Patreon)

Welcome to our biweekly dev log, where we share the latest updates, progress, and insights from our studio. We're excited to provide you with updates on the development of our two games: A Shot in the Dark and Prince of Suburbia.

We're thrilled to announce that Chapter 3 (V0.25) of A Shot in the Dark is now officially released:

• Chapter 3 now available to $5+ Patrons and on Itch.io ($5)
• + Walkthrough + Guide now available to $10+ Patrons and on Itch.io ($10)

We're grateful for the amazing feedback we've received so far on Chapter 3. We love to hear from players, so drop us a line to let us know what your favorite part of the update was!

We've just started working on Chapter 4 (V0.3) of A Shot in the Dark. We have created all the tasks in ClickUp to track our progress and provide percentage updates (which is a day-long project in itself). The outline for Chapter 4 is complete, and scene descriptions and instructions have been prepared to assist our writers.

We're excited to have Mute Hazelnut, one of our talented writers, on board for another chapter. She is already working on a fun Mai scene for Chapter 4! Kitty Kaplan (who wrote all the existing Paloma and Monica scenes) will be taking a break this chapter. (Not to fear, there will still be plenty of hot femdom content with Monica and Paloma in the future!) We have two other writers who might lend a hand with A Shot in the Dark when they finish up with Prince of Suburbia, and we are auditioning another outside writer at the moment.

The more support we have with writing, the more Josselyn can focus on art production, which we hope was apparent with the Chapter 3 update. It was by far our largest and most complex update both in terms of writing and art, thanks to Mute Hazelnut and Kitty Kaplan and their help with the writing.

With the addition of Chapter 3, the new average chapter size for A Shot in the Dark is approximately 50K words, 1,600 renders, and 90 animations. Although Chapter 4 will have more scenes than Chapter 3, we anticipate it to be around the size of an "average" chapter. Of course, as we get deeper into the development cycle, we'll have a better estimate of its size!

Regardless of size, we hope development of Chapter 4 will be faster than Chapter 3 since we won't be overhauling the entire game to add walkthrough features this time! We also do not have a major Steam release planned for the near future, which also caused some of the delays in the development of Chapter 3.

As always, we'll be conducting polls on Patreon and SubscribeStar to gather input from our community regarding outfits and other content for Chapter 4. Stay tuned for these opportunities to have your say in the game's development!

The illustrations and animations for the second beach update (V0.95) of Prince of Suburbia have been completed, and the writing is nearly caught up. TheOmega is currently working hard on coding the V0.95 update!

This beach update has no free roam aspect which mean it is less complicated to code. We do have one remaining scene that had to be handed off from one writer to another, so that is really the only piece that's uncertain at the moment.

Once the V0.95 build is ready for testing, we will make an announcement!

The development of the final story update (V1.0) of Prince of Suburbia is well underway. Many scenes already have a first draft from our writers, and Josselyn is working on weaving them together into a cohesive update.

We anticipate another month or two for art production on V1.0 before we can begin coding. If you've done the math, you've already figured out we hope to have two consecutive Prince of Suburbia updates this summer, instead of alternating with A Shot in the Dark like we usually do.

Thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm for our games. We value your feedback and look forward to sharing more exciting progress in our next dev log!

- ViM Studios