Development Plans & Background Art Preview

I said in the 0.13.0 release post that I'd be giving more detail on development plans, so this post is me attempting to give you all an idea of where I am and what I'm focusing on.

As always, please do contact me (message here, discord, email) if you want to ask questions about things like this in-between these kinds of posts. My aim is to proactively keep you all updated, but obviously I don't want to drain away development time to spam you all with stuff that doesn't matter too much. It helps to get a feel for when people would like an update.

The Patreon has now been running for 6 months, and I still find the level of support unbelievable, so thank you all. 

With that, I've just pushed the 13th major release (0.13.0), and I intend to shift some of my development effort.

Currently, the main focus of every release is adding new scenes. This was really necessary to start with to give people a feel for the game and enough content to sink their teeth into. However, there are other things I'd like to add to the game and changes I'd like to make, and I worry that the "only adding new content" nature of the updates will result in the game not feeling like a cohesive whole if I don't change that a little.

As such, future releases are going to contain more:

•  New mechanical features (e.g: an in-narrative (i.e: not the toolbox) way to see a rough idea of where you stand with the antagonist's stats).
• Updates to older scenes.
• Updates to systems (e.g: adding time skipping features for when events have large gaps between them).
• New artwork.
• Trying to improve the narrative of the game.

Obviously all these things are good, but they will come at the cost of some writing. I don't intend to totally stop writing new scenes, of course, and I'll shift slowly and see how people feel about the content. This should also be offset as the increased Patreon funding will soon mean I can dedicate more time to the game again as I can replace some more of my day job income with that funding.

So in terms of what this means, the change logs will probably start to look a bit more varied and you can expect more mechanical and overarching changes to the game, rather than most releases just being new scenes and bugfixes.

I'd love for this to eventually mean I can do things like release new writing with the artwork at the same time, and to make the game side of the game better.

As always, your feedback is a primary driver to me, so do feel free to say (again, messages or comments here, discord, and email are all great) if you have thoughts or concerns.

As a last note, the new scene artwork is coming, and I'm excited for you all to finally see it in-game. I don't want to spoil too much of the scene itself, so find attached one of the backgrounds (from when you are sat in the toilet at the start of the game). It's fun seeing the world of the game come to life a bit, and I must admit I got a laugh out of this image with the promo overlay over it.

To answer the other frequently asked question: as per the roadmap, the next release is on track for the 30th for Patrons like yourselves in the normal 2-week window.

I can only say thank you again for backing the game, and I hope you all like where the game is going.

—DU