Game Update #16 (Patreon)

It's been two weeks since the last game status update, so let's do another check in, shall we?

The game reached another milestone shortly after the start of the month with the public release of the evening at Matt & Leo's place. It's been great to finally share it widely and see such nice feedback! 

As for the game as it stands today, I'm about 1 week - 1.5 weeks behind where I would prefer to be at this point, but a lot of progress has still been made to reach the dev build milestone.

Script

I've mentioned a number of times now that the writing for this next section of the game is significantly larger than the previous section with Matt and Leo. Word count-wise it's turning out even longer than the update that contained the first part of Connor's second day at school, which you may recall was a pretty significant chunk of content.

A few weeks ago I noted that I had the party mostly done, but I jumped the gun—between story additions, edits, rewrites, and making sure to add alternate versions of scenes to account for all sorts of different variables, it's grown larger than expected. It's taken me a month to get to this point if only because I'm writing upwards of 50,000 words just for this update. That's about the length of a 180 page book. 

As I'm sure you can imagine, writing that much in a short timeframe can be mentally exhausting! But I'm nearing the finish line for this part of the script, and I think all of the featured guys have ended up with some really fun content. 

I'll add as well that inspiration struck a few times and I wrote ahead to the sexual encounters that'll be closing out the final release, meaning I'm ahead of the game in that regard. I'm really happy with how these hookup scenes have been turning out—they're not just hot but also show interesting new facets of the characters involved. 

Art

Art is chugging along on the expected track! I've got new backgrounds and CGs rendered for the dev build. New sprites are coming as well, but after the dev build since I decide what expressions I need during coding, which is the last step.

Coding

I'm starting to dive into coding the party, which isn't the hardest step but is absolutely the most time-consuming one. I'm fitting it in between writing and art creation sessions right now, but I'll soon need to hunker down for several days and do nothing but code. But that's pretty par for the course!

Looking Ahead

Having reached the first real "choices matter" section covering multiple characters, I now have a much clearer idea of how to best partition the game for quicker releases that don't sacrifice too much content. This will start going into effect after the club update, so once we get past Day 2 I hope to keep development time for each update around 4 weeks. I just need to get there first ;)

For now, I'm still focused entirely on this party update and reaching the dev build that'll go out to Seniors & Graduates. Release date-wise, I'm foreseeing the dev build coming out before the end of the month, and then the full early access release in October.  

But as I mentioned in the update at the start of this month, nothing can be 100% guaranteed. I'll just continue to do my best to create the highest quality content I can as a solo developer and keep you regularly updated on the progress!

Thank you for your continued support, everyone! It's a little bit of a wait between each new content release, but it would take even longer if I wasn't able to support working on this as much as I currently am. Your help has been invaluable!

- Danny